Home > Workload Solutions > Oracle > White Papers > Solution Insight: Oracle Analytics Server with Dell PowerFlex Infrastructure > Application tier (Middleware, WLS, and OAS)
This tier hosts the business, application, visualization, and analytics logic. It consists of one or more physical application servers where the WebLogic Server and the Oracle Fusion Middleware products, and OAS are deployed and configured.
OAS software deployment includes the installation of the following software products on each application server/host (BIHOST1, BIHOST2, BIHOSTn):
OAS configuration involves creation or extension of the WebLogic Server or BI domain. Each domain consists of Java components, Non-Java components, and a node manager:
OAS is a scalable platform. Depending on client-request load, OAS can be scaled either vertically (scale-up) or horizontally (scale-out). Scale-up involves adding more OAS components within the same host and scale-out involves adding more hosts to the environment to service additional or increased client request loads. The process of scaling-out includes the following: installing OAS software binaries on a new host, stopping and cloning the components on the first host, packing the domain and unpacking it on the new host, and starting the components on all hosts.
In a production system, it is recommended to deploy two or more instances of every component on two or more physical hosts (BIHOST1, BIHOST2, BIHOSTn). If the system components and Java components are deployed in a clustered environment, for maximum availability, the files and directories (such as product binaries, domain configuration files, BI metadata) including the global cache and shared Oracle BI Scheduler scripts should be on a shared storage device (such as a file-based NFS shared storage). Although the configuration directory and files are located on a shared storage volume for an Administration Server, the shared volume is mounted only on the host that the Administration Server is running on. For Managed Servers, to get the best performance, it is recommended to keep its configuration files on the local storage of the host that it is running on.