Database Support: Introduction to Exalogic Elastic Cloud

Dear Readers,

My name is Franz Devantier, creator of this blog. I am an Oracle Certified Professional (OCP DBA 11g) Security DBA. I will be sharing with you the basic duties of an Oracle DBA, and also some of the undocumented, and not so well known tasks.

I will make a deal with you: If you refer me to a company that needs database support, from a few hours per week to full time, and I am able to sign a contract with them.

Then I will give you 10% of the monthly contract or deal price every month. When the contract ends, and we re-sign the contract, I will again give you 10% of the monthly contract price. This will go on until the company no longer employs or contracts me or my agents to look after their databases.

I can do this, because that 10% is my marketing budget. When we re-sign the contract, in the future, it may depend on you giving the thumbs up again, and that is worth 10% of the monthly contract price, to be given to you as commission.

Contact: Franz

Introduction to Exalogic Elastic Cloud

About Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud

The Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2 is a standard data centre building block. Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2 provides a fully integrated private cloud platform. Exalogic is ideal for mission-critical enterprise application workloads. It can handle from middleware to custom applications, as well as packaged applications from Oracle. Not only that but it can handle applications from hundreds of third party application vendors and tool vendors. In a nutshell Exalogic can host and run a wide range of applications.

The Exalogic machine forms a single, large computing device, because of the internal InfiniBand fabric that connects all of the processing, all of the storage, all of the memory, and all of the external network interfaces within an Exalogic machine. Each Exalogic machine is connected to the customer’s data center networks with 10 GbE (traffic) and GbE (management) interfaces. Exalogic’s InfiniBand technology offers significantly high bandwidth, and low latency, as well as hardware-level reliability and security.

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud offers several new features and benefits:

-> Exalogic supports virtualization

-> Comes with management software, to aid in all aspects of hardware and software management for Exalogic’s virtualization solution. The management software is part of the software stack “Exalogic Control”.

-> Unified interface, for interacting with the Exalogic platform, to configure, use and optimize infrastructure resources.

-> Applications and management tools can interact with the Exalogic platform, using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) API’s that are exposed to customers.

-> Exalogic manages resources supply, configuration, and utilization of the system.

Terminology

Term	Description
Virtualized Data Center (vDC)	A collection of physical compute nodes and storage that sit on the Exalogic fabric. All of these physical resources are organized into a pool that can be accessed by self-service users. vDC offers an access point, through which to allocate and control the resources inside.
Account	An account is created by the Cloud Administrator. An account is a container for the virtual resources in the Exalogic vDC. An account includes the concept of quotas for the amount of CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources that may be consumed within the context of that account; or within the scope of a single vDC.
Quota	A quota is a limit for vCPU, memory, and storage resources defined while creating an account.
Account Resource Limits	Account Resource Limits, represent the sum total of all resources available to all users executing in the context of that account.
Exalogic Systems Administrator	The Exalogic Systems Administrator is responsible for the overall monitoring and management of the Exalogic machine. This includes its hardware components, and network management.
Cloud Administrator	The Cloud Administrator Role is granted to a user who configures the cloud. The Cloud Administrator creates accounts and sets quotas. The cloud administrator will also monitor the resource consumption and Cloud User activities within the vDC (Virtualized Data Center).
Cloud User	The Cloud User Role is granted to a user that consumes resources in the Exalogic vDC. The cloud user’s primary responsibility is to deploy vServers and applications. One Cloud user may have access privileges to more than one Account within the vDC.
Access Keys	Access keys are used for authentication of cloud user requests to a cloud account.
Key Pairs	A Key Pair defines the cloud user credentials to access a vServer.
Exalogic Guest Base Template	Exalogic supports Oracle virtual Machine (OVM) Server Templates for the X86 processor architecture. All of the applications that are deployed to the Exalogic system are deployed to vServers that are derived from a specialized server template, that contains software and tools, that are required for the proper functioning of vServers on Exalogic. This special server template is called the “Exalogic Guest Base Template”.
Server Template	A Server Template is an operating system image in a certain format, that can be used to create a new vServer. Exalogic uses and supports OVM server templates for the X86 processor architecture. “Server Template” is not just an operating system, it also contains application artifacts. In an Exalogic environment, the Server Template is a derivation of the Exalogic Guest Base Template. All of the vServers created in the Exalogic vDC use a Server Template.
Virtual Server (vServer)	A vServer is an entity that provides the outward interface of a stand-alone operating system. vServer is a virtual machine with a guest operating system, which consumes CPU and memory resources. A vserver can be a member of one or more vNets.
Virtual Network (vNet)	A vNet is a networking construct, that dictates which vServers may communicate with which other vServers. A vNet is created by a cloud user. The number of vNets that may be created is determined by the quota that was allocated to the Account by the Cloud Administrator.
Volume	A volume is essentially just a piece of storage. It consumes storage resources from an Account. A Volume that contains a bootable image of an operating system is called a Root Volume. Volumes have their own lifecycle, independent of the vServers that attach to them. A Volume is created by a cloud user. It can be created with an explicit command. When a vServer is created, a Volume can also be implicitly created for use by that vServer.
Snapshot	A snapshot is a “Point-In-Time” image of a Volume. A snapshot is created by a cloud user.