XC Series Nutanix cluster

3 x XC630-10AF:

ESXi 6.0

AOS: 4.7.2

2 x Intel Xeon Processor E5-2698 v3 @ 2.30GHz

512 GB RAM (16 x 32GB DIMMs)

10 x 800GB SATA SSD drives

1 x Intel(R) X520/2P I350 rNDC

1 x X520-2 Ethernet Server Adapter

A single VM will be hosted on each server and Oracle RAC database will be configured using the three VMs.

VM configuration

3 x Oracle Linux VMs:

VM version: 11

OS: Oracle Linux 6.7 UEK3

16 vCPUs, 64GB RAM

CVM: 12 vCPUs, 32GB RAM

The vCPU and memory configuration was increased to 16 vCPUs and 64GB RAM from default values on CVM.

Oracle database

Oracle 12c R1 RAC database:

Oracle ASM (External Dependency)

Oracle 12c EM Express

Silly Little Oracle Benchmark (SLOB)

The SLOB tool was used to simulate real-world Oracle database transactions.

Network

2 x Dell EMC Networking S4810 switches

Firmware: 9.10

Dual redundant switches were used for high availability.

Performance monitoring

Nutanix Prism

VMware vCenter performance monitoring

Oracle 12c EM Express

Performance monitoring for the XC Series cluster was done using Nutanix Prism and vCenter.

Oracle database I/O was monitored using Oracle 12c EM Express which is shipped as part of Oracle 12c.