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Oracle RAC High Availability on PowerStore T
Executive summary PowerStore T overview Validation environment
Validation environment
PowerEdge servers
VMware vSphere 7.0
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
Oracle 19c
HammerDB
VMware virtual machine configuration PowerStore T storage configuration for Oracle Test cases Conclusions Dell Technologies Oracle Specialists References

PowerEdge servers

PowerEdge servers

  • The Dell EMC PowerEdge rack servers that are used in our validation tests are designed for demanding workloads like Oracle databases. The PowerEdge R740 server is a two-socket machine hosting Intel second generation Xeon Scalable processors with up to 28 cores per processor. With the maximum 28 cores per processor, each server can have 56 physical cores and up to 112 virtual cores with hyperthreading enabled.

    Two PowerEdge R640 servers host Oracle databases for testing nonproduction roles in our test lab environment. The R640 is a single rack unit, two-socket form factor server also using Intel second generation Xeon Scalable processors with up to 28 cores per processor. The R640 features 56 physical cores and 112 virtual cores with hyperthreading. The storage capacity differs between the R740 and the R640 due to their rack unit size differences. The 2U R740 supports up to 24 drives while the 1U R640 supports up to 12 drives. To learn more about PowerEdge Rack servers, go to the Dell EMC PowerEdge Rack Servers website.

    PowerEdge servers are divided into series categories that are based on their configuration. For easier reference, they are referred to as YX2X, YX3X, YX4X, YX4XX, or YX5XX series of servers. The structure of the naming convention is described in the online support documentation guide Identifying the series of your Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. Some of the best practices in this white paper refer to these series categories.

    For the validation test environment, Dell Technologies engineers set PowerEdge BIOS settings with configurations specific to the VMware ESXi hypervisor virtualization and databases like Oracle. For example, customers using VMware should use these settings for VMware virtualization:

    • Dell NUMA Fault Resilient Memory (recommendation is to ENABLE)—NUMA Fault Resilient Memory (FRM) is a memory operating mode available on the BIOS settings of high-end PowerEdge servers with two or four processors. This mode establishes an area of memory that is fault-resilient on all processors. This feature provides the same protection to the hypervisor against uncorrectable memory errors that would affect it, while maintaining NUMA memory functionality and performance.
    • Trusted Platform Module (recommendation is to ENABLE)—Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a hardware component that is designed to securely store information such as stored credentials or metrics. TPM 2.0 is enabled and supported with ESXi 6.7.x releases. ESXi 6.7.x introduced the Host Attestation feature, which allows the validation of the boot process to be reported to a vCenter dashboard. TPM 2.0 is supported on all YX3X and YX4X PowerEdge servers including those servers with the latest AMD processors.
    • System Profile (recommendation is set to PERFORMANCE)—Oracle databases benefit from BIOS configuration settings that are available to support high-performance applications. The System Profile is a single setting that configures the many server functions to maximize performance.

    The PowerEdge System Profile Settings window enables you to set the system profile. When set to a mode other than Custom, BIOS will pre-set each option accordingly. The Performance setting configures CPU Power Management to Maximum Performance, configures Memory Frequency to Maximum performance, configures Turbo Boost to Enabled, and implements many other settings that maximize performance for databases. 

    Setting up BIOS on 14th Generation (14G) Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers details the BIOS settings for PowerEdge Servers.