Oracle Exalogic [EOL] Reviews

The most valuable features are a fast and effective UI, and easy provisioning. Automated tasks can be instituted during service delivery. I use the available templates for PeopleSoft and ESB.

We use this platform internally for presales demonstrations, proof of concepts, training, and hands-on labs with our customers.

• Expand the templates and appliances like those that are available in OVM 3.4, such as the Oracle database firewall used in IPoIB private networks.
• Use of Virtual Network Services (VNS 1..02) for multi-tenancy (MT) use cases, and building secure enclaves.
• Continued evolution of the integration with EM 13c to extend MWaaS/PaaS and IaaS on Exalogic into the Oracle Cloud.
• Tell the great story of WebLogic Partitions for separation and promotion up/from the Oracle public cloud (using Exalogic as the on-premise platform of choice).
• Using OVAB or something like that to support Exalogic would be nice to have. The OVAB studio is not supported on Exalogic. That nurtured a service opportunity for application deployments using OVAB on Exalogic.
• Setting up different InfiniBand partitions in the EMOC would be a nice to have for additional MTs.

I have used it for three years.

The root filesystem on the physical computer nodes began to fill-up as images were added with each quarterly PSU upgrade. We might want to expand that filesystem to account for that. Also, provisioning more than a dozen VMs can be problematic for the proxy servers to handle, and some of the jobs fail. There seems to be no issue with less than 10 VMs.

There were no scalability issues to date.

We received very good technical support.

We had previous experience with HP’s CloudSystem Matrix and CloudSystem Enterprise. The Oracle platform has a much better and tighter integration between the network, storage and software.

The setup was straightforward using the ECU.

We did not evaluate any other options before choosing Exalogic.

If you are using only LINUX/Solaris and Oracle Fusion MW products, then this is a great platform.

The most valuable feature I've seen in the Exalogic platform is the integration it has with the Exadata. When I'm running WebLogic based wordloads, that really need low latency to an Exadata for improved input, improved latency, that's the big value of the Exalogic.

The benefits is it reduces the latency, reduces the amount of time for the Exalogic to get data from the database on the Exadata. When you're running OLTP applications that are very time sensitive, that's where it really comes in to play because you see the performance noticeably improve compared to other solutions.

There's a lot of additional features I would like to see in the Exalogic. The user interface would be nice to better integrate into Enterprise Manager 13 and eliminate the whole EMOC layer to the Exalogic. That causes a lot of confusion both internally as well as clients that use the platform.

I have been working with Exalogic systems for the last three years

A few, mainly due to how the OS deals with infinniband. Once you learn how that works your fine.

Stability of Exalogic's been great. In a virtualized environment, runs OVM, doing a lot of work with it. In fact, we've been using some of the Exalogic here at this event to run some of our hands-on labs that I've been doing as community efforts and haven't had any issues with stability on it, no big panics. With any system, you do have to patch it. If you don't patch it for a year or two, you might start getting some bugs.

Scalability, you can take it up to a full cabinet and that's not been an issue at all. It's a lot of horsepower in a single cabinet.

Technical support for Exalogic is okay. It's acceptable. Again, it's a complicated platform and it has some limitations that tend to have to call support a little more often.

What you really look at on an Exalogic is what's your application and would the benefit of the lower latency when you connect to the Exadata really improve your application to the point that that's the solution you want to go to.

The initial setup on the Exalogic when you're running it is pretty straight forward. It's an engineered system so most of it's up and running. You put it in the data center, do some configuration on it, and you're up and running in a day.

Rating: I'd give Exalogic probably a 7.5. The reason is, the issues with the Emoc system and that integration, that user interface is very different. Also, some of the limitations on the Exalogic. You have to use Oracle's OS load, you can't run Windows. There's some limitations to how it works that causes some confusion. That's why I'd rate it a little lower.

My recommendation for peers if you're looking for a need to reduce the latency for your workload, definitely take a look at it. It's definitely going to be the fastest thing out there to solve that issue for your connectivity to the Exadata when you're running a WebLogic based application. You need to take a look at it for that reason alone. Be prepared for some of the limitations and make sure your application works within those limitations.

The most valuable feature of the product is the infinity band solution, but only if you have all of the components – Applications, Middleware, Database – running in the same cloud or in the same box.

The technology has a good I/O response rate that permits very high data processing between the frontend and backend layers.

We used it a lot for BI Operations, for JMS, and other business operations that need a very fast response for webservices and the result was satisfactory. On comparison with other solutions, VM for example, we saw a 70% performance improvement.

The storage system needs to be improved. Perhaps the newer version (X4) is better but on X3, we had many storage issues.

I used it for three years.

I had an issue with the GFS of the storage.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Technical support is an issue for Oracle, not only for Exalogic products; it needs to improve. We didn't see good response from support, not as far as the response time, but about its effectiveness. We had a lot of boring situations, so the level of technical support was very bad.

We started using our applications over VMware solutions (vSphere). We were having some I/O constraints that forced us to research other solutions.

Initial setup was not totally straightforward, but not complex either. We did the 2 Box setup in about three weeks, including all Oracle Fusion Middleware products.
I guess the most complex part was the partition setup, some network definitions, etc.

It’s very difficult to define pricing and licensing. Nonetheless, if you want a mid-range solution (you don't have much space on your datacenter, etc.), and you want to group technologies, such as network devices, storage systems, etc., and software licenses too of course, well, it can be a good choice.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated IBM blades and other similar architecture. We started to bring back some environments to para-virtualized hosts, some with full virtualization, others only using the blade hosts, or IBM LPARs, etc.

Well, first check if your requirements are aligned with the solution. For example, if your solution will need to connect or consume external resources (webservices, B2B, SAP, etc.) that are not in the same cloud. If this is the case, then it probably is not a good idea to choose this solution.

The product is best used to create private clouds for middleware based on the Oracle stack and on Oracle Enterprise applications that use the WebLogic platform.This is simply the best-performing platform for this particular use case. However, the product is not appropriate for other technology stacks. Even though it might in some cases be able to run them, the results will not be as optimal. For example, Oracle E-Business Suite version 12.13 is not based on WebLogic, but on OC4J; hence, the advantages of running it on Exalogic are not as significant as the benefits with E-Business Suite 12.2, which is WebLogic based.

Also, virtual machines in Exalogic need to be based on special templates that allow VM access to the native InfiniBand protocol, something which is not available in all the other virtualization solutions that use InfiniBand as a backbone but do not expose it to the VMs.

As mentioned, we do not internally use this product, but we have implemented it for our clients. When combined with other engineered systems such as Exadata, we have seen from 20% to 60% better performance overall with certain operations showing much, much improved execution times.

Currently the management functions of Exalogic are not as smooth as one would desire. Basically, it is designed with one objective in mind and that is performance. Because of this, the user interface might not be as user friendly as one would expect.

Also, one of the shortcomings of the current product is that it does not allow the internal ZFS to be expanded with multiple storage trays. This would be a very useful capability and it would also enable active-active failover at the storage layer.

We have implemented this solution for several of our customers starting from 2013. We have used multiple versions of this product in both bare metal and virtualized setups.

On the whole, once we understood how things worked, we were able to use the product well; initial versions of the software had problems with dynamic scaling of resources. It was difficult to adjust the memory and CPU resources of the virtual machines; however, this has been addressed in the current software releases.

The customer service and technical support we have received has been very good. We have had a chance to interact with the Oracle Exalogic A-team on occasion and they have been very generous of their time.

The initial setup is a little complex as there are a lot of moving parts that have to be filled in a spreadsheet at the outset; because there can be many different virtual IP addresses that must not clash with any others in the DC, even if the sub nets will never be routed out of the Exalogic rack (because if you create an IP over IB subnet, then any external system in the same subnet will automatically become unreachable). It takes a lot of preplanning to get things just right.

As we are ourselves qualified for implementation, it was a combination of the vendor team (Oracle) and our in-house team that did the installations. My advice to anyone who is implementing it for the first time would be to seriously think about engaging an SI, as there are a lot of gotchas that the default Oracle OCS team is not going to be walking you through during the actual five days or so of installation.

At the clients where the systems have been installed, the system pays for itself within two years and by utilizing COD and Oracle VM-based licensing, they were able to restrict software license costs to make this a very compelling proposition.

We evaluated multiple solutions for different clients. However, as mentioned, this is the one that provides the best possible performance.

As mentioned, this is the best platform for WebLogic. I strongly recommend coupling this with Exadata, as there are multiplied benefits with this approach. The solution is not for everyone, though smaller companies can go for an IaaS op-ex model now, but the real target audience is organizations who want the best possible performance from the Oracle stack.

InfiniBand (internal Exalogic network) minimizes any network outages. Exalogic has a very speedy and stable connection to Exadata (DB server) via InfiniBand. This feature is vital for products such as Oracle Fusion SOA Suite that heavily depend on DB speed and stability.

Scalability: We can easily and out of the box upgrade any domain.

• Standard approach for monitoring and troubleshooting
• Less time spent on troubleshooting, as there is almost no fallout of lost messages
• Number of non-completed requests decreased significantly due to the stable internal network

I would like to be able to dynamically size the virtual servers. Today, this requires a full reboot.

I have been using it for three years.

Not anymore. Several months ago, we had some stability issues but, following patches delivered by Oracle, the machines are very stable.

Technical support is 7/10.

We used to work with VMware farms. Due to network issues and resource starvation under heavy load, we were exposed to significant support from operational teams for the non-completed and lost transactions.

As far as my colleague and I recall, no other option was considered, because Oracle “gave us an offer, we couldn’t refuse”. J

The box required design that was done mostly by Oracle; it was complex, and the implementation of the first machine took about four months with extended Oracle support.

License costs depend on your business relationship with Oracle.

The product is good but complex, and requires extensive internal knowledge to build it up and support.

It's vendor-managed, preconfigured, and engineered. It's important mainly for reducing time and complexity in the setup and first delivery of IT environments.

It's improved the delivery of virtual machines and setting them up with WebLogic (Application Server).

Live Migration of the vServers will be a plus, as well as a more robust EMOC/EL control behavior.

We started using it in 2013, so for about four years.

We had no issues with the deployment.

We faced, a few times, problems with the stability of the platform due to storage issues.

We have had no issues scaling it as needed.

The overall rating is sufficient, but we expected a little bit better. And for our level of complexity, we'd like a more responsive attitude from the Oracle Support.

We moved our WebLogic Servers from a Linux standard infrastructure to the Exalogic Platform in order to have a single "family" environment.

The initial setup was fine, and it was performed according to our prerequisites.

We proceeded in two ways. First, the initial setup was provided by the vendor team. After that, we managed the platform on our own, and designed the best vDC configuration.

It can be a good choice if you like to avoid labour in setting up the storage, network and computing. After this, you need to be prepared to rely on your team or the vendor support team because you’re going to face small but frequent issues.

We use Oracle Database with the real application clusters and the Exalogic is the most matching real application cluster. We are now using the Oracle X3, X4, and X5 in our production environment. From the X3-2, the Exalogic started applying the very first technologies for cache writing, and so I believe Exalogic is the most stable rear echelon type database, especially for financial systems.

There are many benefits of Exalogic, but I believe the most important point is production stability. There's almost no down-time. It's very important, especially for financial services because 24/7, nonstop services are required.

The current Exalogic X5-2 is enough for financial systems. Exadata's current speed is almost enough but sometimes much slower than the older mainframe systems, so some performance improvements would be helpful.

Very stable.

Yes. It scales well.

We needed to migrate by hand all of the MSS SCSI servers and all the database servers. Unfortunately, Oracle and GoldenGate don't support all the systems, so we decided to migrate by hand.

Oracle Engineered Systems are the best solution for Oracle and non-Oracle applications: hardware and software are combined together to ensure high availability and maximum performance. Oracle Exadata contains all the advantages of standard Oracle Database, but on top of that there are exclusive features such as IORM (IO Resource Manager) and HCC (Hybrid Columnar Compression). IORM (in combination with Database Resource Manager (DBRM)) permits you to isolate I/O requests to avoid I/O saturation. HCC provides different levels of compression to reduce space allocation and to decrease I/O.

Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic are standard-based. Customers can easily migrate their existing applications based on Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic: they can take advantages of Engineered Systems with minimal effort during the migration process. Customers can benefit from high performance without modifying Java or SQL code and they can decide to use specific features after migrating to Exadata/Exalogic. Also, Engineered Systems can be used to consolidate complex environments: for example, our customer was able to decommission about 20 blades, using a single 1/8 Exalogic x4-2. Finally, Exadata and Exalogic simplifies patching/upgrading process, unifying firmware upgrades, ILOM upgrades, OS patching, Database/WebLogic upgrade/patching in one "single-vendor" activity.

EMOC (Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center) is not very user-friendly, the user interface could be improved.

We installed the first Exalogic in 2013.

It provides a standard procedure to scale the number of compute/storage nodes.

6/10

There was no solution in place previously.

Using Exadata and Exalogic, you can get the best performance optimizing the number of CPUs, saving costs on software licensing. Also, if you consolidate your environment using Engineered Systems, you can save money on hardware (storage/compute capacity).

No other options were looked at.

As best practice, before starting the installation you should have a look at the Oracle Documentation. Oracle provides a "Getting Started Guide" to get up-to-date checklists to verify requirements (for example IP addresses, name syntax, etc.) and to be sure your infrastructure is ready for the installation. Also, we recommend to install Oracle Enterprise Manager as a monitoring solution: it is fully integrated with Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic, you can monitor hardware (compute nodes, switches, ILKOM etc.) and software (operating system, Database, WebLogic, business applications etc.).