Carlos Sierra's Tools and Tips

Enkitec’s Sizing and Provisioning (eSP) is a new internal tool designed and developed with Oracle Engineered Systems in mind. Thanks to the experience and insights from Randy Johnson, Karl Arao and Frits Hoogland, what began as a pet project for some of us, over time became an actual robust APEX/PLSQL application, developed by Christoph Ruepprich and myself, and ready to debut at Oracle Open World 2014.

This posting is about eSP, what it does, and how it helps on the sizing and provisioning of Oracle Engineered System, or I would rather say, any System where Oracle runs.

We used to size Engineered Systems using a complex and very useful spread sheet developed by Randy Johnson and Karl Arao. Now, it is the turn for eSP to take the next step, and move this effort forward into a more scalable application that sits on top of one of our Exadata machines.

Sizing an Engineered System

Sizing a System can be quite challenging, especially when the current system is composed of several hosts with multiple databases of diverse use, size, versions, workloads, etc. The new target system may also bring some complexities; as the number of possible configurations grows, finding the right choice becomes harder. Then we also have the challenge of disk redundancy, recovery areas, the potential benefits of offloading with their smart scans, just to mention some added complexities.

At a very high level, Sizing a System is about 3 entities: Resources, Capacity and Utilization. Resources define what I call “demand”, which is basically the set of computational resources from your original System made of one or many databases and instances over some hosts. Capacity, which I also call it “supply”, is the set of possible target Systems with their multiple Configurations, in other words Engineered Systems, or any other hardware capable to host Oracle databases. Utilization, which I may also refer as “allocation” is where the magic and challenge resides. It is a clever and unbiassed mapping between databases and configurations, then between instances and nodes. This mapping has to consider at the very least CPU footprint, Memory for SGA and PGA, database disk space, and throughput in terms of IOPS and MBPS. Additional constraints, as mentioned before, include redundancy and offloading among others. CPU can be a bit tricky since each CPU make and model has its own characteristics, so mapping them requires the use of SPEC.

Other challenge a Sizing tool has to consider is the variability of the Resources. The question becomes: Do we see the Resources as a worst case scenario, or shall we rather consider them as time series? In other words, do we compute and use peaks, or do we observe the use of Resources over time, then develop some methods to aggregate them consistently as time series? If we decide to use a reduced set of data points, do we use peaks or percentiles? if the latter, which percentile is well balanced? 99.9, 99, 95 or maybe 90? How conservative are those values? There are so many questions and the answer for most of them, as you may guess is: “it all depends”.

How eSP Works

Without getting into the technical details, I can say that eSP is an APEX application with a repository on an Oracle database, which inputs collected “Requirements” from the databases to be sized, then it processes these Requirements and prepares them to be “Allocated” into one or more defined hardware configurations. The process is for the most part “automated”, meaning this: we execute some tool or script in the set of hosts where the databases reside, then upload the output of these collectors into eSP and we are ready to Plan and apply “what-if” scenarios. Having an Exadata System as our work engine, it allows this eSP application to scale quite well. A “what-if” scenario takes as long as it takes to navigate APEX pages,while all the computations are done in sub-seconds behind scenes, thanks to Exadata!

Once we load the Resources from the eSP collector script, or from the eAdam tool, we can start playing with the metadata. Since eSP’s set of known Configurations (Capacity) include current Engineered Systems (X4), allocating Configurations is a matter of seconds, then mapping databases and instances becomes the next step. eSP contains an auto “allocate” algorithm for databases and instances, where we can choose between a “balanced” allocation or one that is “dense” with several density factors to choose from (100%, 90%, 80%, 70%, 60% and 50%). With all these automated options, we can try multiple sizing and allocation possibilities in seconds, regardless if we are Sizing and Provisioning for one database or a hundred of them.

eSP and OOW

The Enkitec’s Sizing and Provisioning (eSP) tool is an internal application that we created to help our customers to Size their next System or Systems in a sensible manner. The methods we implemented are transparent and unbiassed. We are bringing eSP to Oracle Open World 2014. I will personally demo eSP at our assigned booth, which is #111 at the Moscone South. I will be on and off the booth, so if you are interested on a demo please let me know, or contact your Enkitec/Accenture representative. We do prefer appointments, but walk-ins are welcomed. Hope to see you at OOW!