Oracle Exalogic [EOL] Reviews

This product offers a strong infrastructure with compute, storage, and network in a private cloud environment, enabling the organization to concentrate on business application development and improvement.

• High-speed network
• Strong storage features (ZFS)
• High Availability out of the box
• Integrated with a large number of products

With the shift to public cloud, and with Oracle releasing Oracle Public Cloud Machine and Oracle Private Cloud Appliance, the Exalogic X6-2 version was still released, but, clearer goals in the product roadmap are necessary to be able to affirm the improvements.

Initially, yes, there were stability issues. A number of redesigns were needed to stabilize the Hypervisor, control the stack layer, as well as the software defined network drivers (Mellanox bugs causing compute nodes to reboot). The latter was addressed by a heavy work initiative, but required a set of patching, impacting customers' system stability.

Just cost. To expand the hardware's capability requires a massive investment.

Depends on the level paid for. The Platinum Services offered by Oracle's Advanced Customer Services offers a multi-level mechanism of automatic service request creation and advanced monitoring. When all of its support features are integrated with customer's incident and change-management systems, it is a very effective model, with a proactive hardware replacement component. In cases of hardware fault, there is automatic shipment of parts without much effort to get it quickly fixed.

VMware. We switched because of the capabilities offered with Exalogic for integration with other engineered systems, which increases the throughput capability and enables processing of bigger and heavier workloads.

The initial setup is straightforward, but post-setup requires a very detailed and accurate design/architecture to avoid re-work in the storage and network layers.

Pricing and licensing are two very delicate aspects when talking about Oracle, especially engineered systems. The prices are quite high compared with other similar products, so the CapEx analysis and investment return have to be very well studied.

I rate this product eight out of 10. After years of stabilization (a lot of known bugs and issues with compute nodes rebooting due to InfiniBand HCAs and driver bugs, etc.) the product has achieved stability as a private cloud appliance.

Make sure you align the application and integration architecture with the sizing and the product's distribution. As its virtual datacenter is oriented to the network structure, once the VMs are created with an initial network configuration, it is not possible to change, despite destroying and recreating the VMs. This is acceptable in some cases, as long as the remaining automation process can reset the VMs.

Oracle Engineered Systems are the best solution for Oracle and non-Oracle applications: hardware and software are combined together to ensure high availability and maximum performance. Oracle Exadata contains all the advantages of standard Oracle Database, but on top of that there are exclusive features such as IORM (IO Resource Manager) and HCC (Hybrid Columnar Compression). IORM (in combination with Database Resource Manager (DBRM)) permits you to isolate I/O requests to avoid I/O saturation. HCC provides different levels of compression to reduce space allocation and to decrease I/O.

Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic are standard-based. Customers can easily migrate their existing applications based on Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic: they can take advantages of Engineered Systems with minimal effort during the migration process. Customers can benefit from high performance without modifying Java or SQL code and they can decide to use specific features after migrating to Exadata/Exalogic. Also, Engineered Systems can be used to consolidate complex environments: for example, our customer was able to decommission about 20 blades, using a single 1/8 Exalogic x4-2. Finally, Exadata and Exalogic simplifies patching/upgrading process, unifying firmware upgrades, ILOM upgrades, OS patching, Database/WebLogic upgrade/patching in one "single-vendor" activity.

EMOC (Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center) is not very user-friendly, the user interface could be improved.

We installed the first Exalogic in 2013.

It provides a standard procedure to scale the number of compute/storage nodes.

6/10

There was no solution in place previously.

Using Exadata and Exalogic, you can get the best performance optimizing the number of CPUs, saving costs on software licensing. Also, if you consolidate your environment using Engineered Systems, you can save money on hardware (storage/compute capacity).

No other options were looked at.

As best practice, before starting the installation you should have a look at the Oracle Documentation. Oracle provides a "Getting Started Guide" to get up-to-date checklists to verify requirements (for example IP addresses, name syntax, etc.) and to be sure your infrastructure is ready for the installation. Also, we recommend to install Oracle Enterprise Manager as a monitoring solution: it is fully integrated with Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic, you can monitor hardware (compute nodes, switches, ILKOM etc.) and software (operating system, Database, WebLogic, business applications etc.).

• Oracle application/middleware performance optimization
• Virtualization with bare metal performance

Exalogic has provided us and our customers with high performance Oracle Weblogic, eBusiness Suite applications and concurrent manager platform. Even with running in a virtualized configuration, the performance seen has been better than running on non-Exalogic physical environments. The ability to connect Exalogic to Exadata via Infiniband has also optimized performance between application and database improving application performance. This is particularly true for chatty weblogic applications or eBS large concurrent manager jobs like those related to advanced supply chain planning.

The administration of the VMs is cumbersome and lacks features that are taken for granted in other virtualization platforms – many administrative and availability features, even available in traditional OVM, are not available on Exalogic. This includes not having the ability to increase VM resources while the VM is online, or even being able to change CPU and memory sizes for a VM without recreating and cloning it. There is also no live migration feature available.

I've been using it for two and a half years.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

We've had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

The support on the Exalogic is much better than other, non-engineered Oracle environments. Exalogic comes included with Oracle Platinum Services – a higher level of Oracle technical support – providing Oracle access to the system and allowing for faster responsiveness and resolution to issues.

The initial setup has to be performed by Oracle or a certified partner. Stating that, the initial install and setup is straightforward and is completed in a few days.

As an Oracle certified partner, we implemented in-house. My advice is to utilize Oracle certified Partners, to do the implementation or utilize Oracle ACS. We have also had experiences with network conflicts in past Exalogic implementations. And much of the network configuration can not be changed without a re-install. My advice is to ensure the network addresses and information given in the Exalogic Configurator worksheet, filled out before install, is accurate and does not conflict with other addresses in the corporate network.

We compared commodity server based environments – but they were unable to match the performance of Exalogic.

Exalogic is an environment built for performance for Oracle middleware and application workloads. If you are looking for the best performance for such environments, at the expense of some ease of administration, then this environment is for you.

The most valuable feature I've seen in the Exalogic platform is the integration it has with the Exadata. When I'm running WebLogic based wordloads, that really need low latency to an Exadata for improved input, improved latency, that's the big value of the Exalogic.

The benefits is it reduces the latency, reduces the amount of time for the Exalogic to get data from the database on the Exadata. When you're running OLTP applications that are very time sensitive, that's where it really comes in to play because you see the performance noticeably improve compared to other solutions.

There's a lot of additional features I would like to see in the Exalogic. The user interface would be nice to better integrate into Enterprise Manager 13 and eliminate the whole EMOC layer to the Exalogic. That causes a lot of confusion both internally as well as clients that use the platform.

I have been working with Exalogic systems for the last three years

A few, mainly due to how the OS deals with infinniband. Once you learn how that works your fine.

Stability of Exalogic's been great. In a virtualized environment, runs OVM, doing a lot of work with it. In fact, we've been using some of the Exalogic here at this event to run some of our hands-on labs that I've been doing as community efforts and haven't had any issues with stability on it, no big panics. With any system, you do have to patch it. If you don't patch it for a year or two, you might start getting some bugs.

Scalability, you can take it up to a full cabinet and that's not been an issue at all. It's a lot of horsepower in a single cabinet.

Technical support for Exalogic is okay. It's acceptable. Again, it's a complicated platform and it has some limitations that tend to have to call support a little more often.

What you really look at on an Exalogic is what's your application and would the benefit of the lower latency when you connect to the Exadata really improve your application to the point that that's the solution you want to go to.

The initial setup on the Exalogic when you're running it is pretty straight forward. It's an engineered system so most of it's up and running. You put it in the data center, do some configuration on it, and you're up and running in a day.

Rating: I'd give Exalogic probably a 7.5. The reason is, the issues with the Emoc system and that integration, that user interface is very different. Also, some of the limitations on the Exalogic. You have to use Oracle's OS load, you can't run Windows. There's some limitations to how it works that causes some confusion. That's why I'd rate it a little lower.

My recommendation for peers if you're looking for a need to reduce the latency for your workload, definitely take a look at it. It's definitely going to be the fastest thing out there to solve that issue for your connectivity to the Exadata when you're running a WebLogic based application. You need to take a look at it for that reason alone. Be prepared for some of the limitations and make sure your application works within those limitations.

The most valuable features are a fast and effective UI, and easy provisioning. Automated tasks can be instituted during service delivery. I use the available templates for PeopleSoft and ESB.

We use this platform internally for presales demonstrations, proof of concepts, training, and hands-on labs with our customers.

• Expand the templates and appliances like those that are available in OVM 3.4, such as the Oracle database firewall used in IPoIB private networks.
• Use of Virtual Network Services (VNS 1..02) for multi-tenancy (MT) use cases, and building secure enclaves.
• Continued evolution of the integration with EM 13c to extend MWaaS/PaaS and IaaS on Exalogic into the Oracle Cloud.
• Tell the great story of WebLogic Partitions for separation and promotion up/from the Oracle public cloud (using Exalogic as the on-premise platform of choice).
• Using OVAB or something like that to support Exalogic would be nice to have. The OVAB studio is not supported on Exalogic. That nurtured a service opportunity for application deployments using OVAB on Exalogic.
• Setting up different InfiniBand partitions in the EMOC would be a nice to have for additional MTs.

I have used it for three years.

The root filesystem on the physical computer nodes began to fill-up as images were added with each quarterly PSU upgrade. We might want to expand that filesystem to account for that. Also, provisioning more than a dozen VMs can be problematic for the proxy servers to handle, and some of the jobs fail. There seems to be no issue with less than 10 VMs.

There were no scalability issues to date.

We received very good technical support.

We had previous experience with HP’s CloudSystem Matrix and CloudSystem Enterprise. The Oracle platform has a much better and tighter integration between the network, storage and software.

The setup was straightforward using the ECU.

We did not evaluate any other options before choosing Exalogic.

If you are using only LINUX/Solaris and Oracle Fusion MW products, then this is a great platform.

The virtualized app servers for enterprise systems supporting all HR functions is valuable.

We get better performance and utilization of resources since it was implemented. It's helped to reduce the batch cycle from over 40 hours to about eight.

It's very expensive. Oracle Platinum Services (patching) is terrible, and we haven't had a patching exercise occur without significant problems and often impact to production operations.

We began the implementation the fall of 2012 and completed in September of 2013. It has been in place since then with expansion and upgrades along the way.

Significant issues with deployment of OTD (Oracle Traffic Director).

Stability for the most part has been good with some production impact which resulted from patching and version control. The product needs a better support model.

Level 1 and Level 2 I would give 6/10. Level 3 I would give 9/10. The problem was the time it took to reach the appropriate level of support to solve the problem.

Prior to the Exa platform we ran on M5000.

This was a complex implementation. Implementation of Grid, RAC, and especially OTD was a nightmare. However, once solved, it has performed well and remained stable. This was not an issue with the solution itself but more related to the technical understanding of the network design coupled with the technical knowledge required for setup of OTD. We ultimately received level three support from the Oracle product team that solved the problem. The level 3 product team was excellent.

I led the vendor team team that managed the implementation. We also engaged ACS and OCS (Oracle Consulting Service) to assist with the implementation.

Selection of Exa was after a Proof of Concept comparison with VCE, IBM, and HP. Exa had superior performance results with a significant higher cost.

I would suggest that you do not underestimate the work involved and if working with OCS closely manage the deliverables and hours.

Storage. Strong in data integrity.

It doesn’t improve the way my organization functions. It has only one feature that improves app performance, but in a specific way. Everything else can be done with any other infrastructure hardware/software.

- Management console: Awful to use it, complicated, too many options spread around many menus that don’t make any sense.
- Networking: Everything is locked. It doesn’t allow you to change an IP address after creating a VM.
- VM template creation: Too complicated. Better install manually.

I’ve been using it for 8 months.

I encountered deployment failures for a simple VM (disk problems). Every deployment or configuration change in Exalogic is a surprise. It is not reliable.

However, once it’s running, it does not stop.

I’d say technical support is 9/10, but you need to keep up the pressure or else it will be “forgotten”.

I previously used a different solution.

I did not choose this product. I run it for a customer in his environment.

I wasn’t part of the initial setup. I can’t give my opinion.

Oracle implemented it.

I’m an outsourced provider for this client/product. I don’t have financial numbers regarding ROI.

I’d go for this product only if I have a really specific application to run, and it has proven better use with this product. Otherwise, I’d look for anything else.