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The compute layer provides all physical hosts or computing requirements for the application and database tiers. The PowerFlex compute layer can scale independently of the PowerFlex storage layer. This provides Oracle EBS customers the flexibility to add PowerFlex compute-only nodes to any of the tiers, at any time, as their workloads demand. In the PowerFlex architecture, compute-only nodes are referred to as SDC.
In this example, we designed the load balancing among the servers and services of the Application tier to help provide higher availability, fault tolerance, reliability, and optimal scalability. The load balancing can be achieved for the following application tier services:
Two PowerFlex compute-only nodes are allocated for each group of these services. This configuration allows a workload load balancing between the two nodes. For example, load balancer distributes client tier connections to these two web service nodes. The forms service requests and concurrent processing requests can be distributed among the two forms service nodes and the concurrent processing server nodes respectively. Two or more concurrent processing server nodes also allows us to implement an important Oracle EBS HA feature called Parallel Concurrent Processing (PCP). This feature allows the distribution of concurrent managers (the core component of the batch processing application services) across multiple application nodes in a clustered, parallel, or networked environment.
For the high availability of services, in an event of any node failure, these services can be failed over the surviving nodes to continue their operations.
Another key load balancing feature of the application tiers is to share the application tier file system across multiple application tier nodes. This allows the application tier servers and services to be enabled or disabled on certain nodes, optimizing the use of the available hardware resources. This also provides the flexibility to add new nodes or remove existing nodes. The key component of the shared application tier file system is APPL_TOP. This directory contains all the Oracle EBS core technology files and directories such as all product directories and files, environment files are stored. This shared application tier file system is achieved with the file-based shared storage that is mounted on each application tier node. This file-based shared storage is provided by the PowerFlex File Storage nodes.
The database tier can have two or more bare-metal PowerFlex Compute Only nodes for Oracle Database Real Application Clusters (RAC). These compute-only nodes are interconnected with the 25 GB network provided by the PowerFlex as the private network for the Oracle Clusterware and the Oracle RAC.
Through SDC, these database tier nodes have access to the shared storage volumes provided by the PowerFlex storage nodes.
The RAC database provides the highly available database tier access for various application tier services like the form services and the concurrent server. The application tier nodes connect to the RAC database nodes with the PowerFlex network through the Oracle database services built on the RAC database nodes. .
This RAC database configuration provides high scalability and availability for Oracle EBS, for example, in case of a clustered node failure, the database services for the application tiers nodes will fail over to the surviving nodes. For more details of configuring Oracle RAC database for Oracle EBS, see Oracle documentation in References.