Home > Workload Solutions > Oracle > Best Practices > Intel-Based Oracle Best Practices on Dell PowerEdge R740 and PowerMax 2000 > Introduction to Best Practices for Oracle > Physical Architecture
The architecture was designed to broadly represent the infrastructure that customers use for their Oracle databases. Dell EMC PowerEdge R740 servers were used for the compute layer. Each PowerEdge R740 was configured the same to ensure consistency of test results. Two Intel Xeon Gold 6254 processors with 18 physical cores each for a total of 36 cores were used. The default server configuration enables logical processors so that at the hypervisor layer 72 cores were available. The following table shows the configuration details:
Table 2: Server configuration
Processors |
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---|---|
Memory |
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Network Adapters |
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HBA |
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Storage controller and hard drives |
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To learn more about the server visit the PowerEdge R740 page and download the specification sheet.
For connectivity from the servers to the PowerMax storage array Dell EMC Connectrix switches were used. The Connectrix DS-6620B is designed to support medium-to-large sized database deployments. The Connectrix configuration used in our tests included 24 active 32 Gb/s ports to optimize the connection to the PowerMax storage.
A PowerMax 2000 storage array was used to validate best practices. The PowerMax 2000 offers enterprise-rich data services like snapshots, replication, and many other features in a small footprint. In the PowerMax configuration used there were 34 flash drives, each 4 TB in size. Additionally, the PowerMax had 18 NVMe drives, each 1.5 TB in size.
The following table gives full details of the PowerMax 2000 configuration:
Table 3: PowerMax 2000 configuration details
Processors |
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Bricks |
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Cache size |
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Drives |
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Total usable capacity |
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Front-end I/O modules |
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Many production database systems use dedicated infrastructure. In validating Oracle best practices, all the Dell EMC infrastructure was reserved for the database. No parallel workloads were running and competing for CPU, network, and storage resources. This approach of validating best practices in a dedicated environment was used to eliminate extraneous variables that might negatively impact test results. We understand many of today’s environments have been consolidated and the challenges that can arise in tuning one database system on shared infrastructure.
With consolidated systems the implementation of best practices might improve performance, but the positive gains might not be as significant due to the shared resources. Using these best practices can assist with resolving some challenges by integrating Day 1, highly recommended configuration as part of provisioning an Oracle database. As the database ecosystem transforms using best practices, overall systems performance may rise and consolidated systems might performance more efficiently. Best practices offer the enterprise the ability to deploy a database with the optimal design and ecosystems with the capability to drive improved efficiencies.