RE: 20 Instances 1 Machine

Greg - I thought maybe I was a little slow yesterday, being Monday, so I waited until today and reread your reply. So back to the original question, why do you create many Oracle instances on a single server instead of just having a single instance with many schemas in it. Is there a technical reason that gives you improved performance? Does your business enjoy the flexibility of being able to move an instance to another service very easily? Or is it "just the way we do things". I infer from your reply that perhaps each development project ends up as a separate Oracle instance. Is this simply an easier way to roll a development project into production?

The only other hint I receive from your reply is that perhaps you are installing third-party applications, and then it makes sense to keep each application in a separate Oracle instance. This is a key point. My experience is that in-house developed applications tend to make heavy use of existing data, while obviously third-party applications are self-contained. With their data sharing, that means in-house applications will work better within the same Oracle instance.

    For third-party applications, I guess that my experience has been that small third-party applications usually use ODBC, so don't care so much which Oracle version they are on. Therefore I have tended to just allocate them a schema within a shared Oracle instance, while I would agree that large, sophisticated third-party applications should have their own Oracle instance and may end up on their own server at a future time. At this point the only application we have like that is our ERP application, but there is a possibility that others will be purchased in the future, so I appreciate ideas from others with more experience in these decisions. Thanks for your ideas,
Dennis Williams
DBA
Lifetouch, Inc.
dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, August 05, 2002 11:29 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Well, it's the environment that we are building for the enterprise servers. It will provide us with a lower cost of for the server farm. By the time you add up hardware, floorspace, people, and utilities - the large box server farm has illustrated to be cheaper in the long run.. As well as getting to projects thru the pipeline a little quicker instead of waiting for the project to flow thru the paperwork for purchasing/procurement process. I can request space requirements on those machines easier/quicker than going getting PO's approved for additional "small rack mounted" servers all over the place. It's also easier for us to purchase the system boards (CPU/Memory). And we use the Resource Manager to allocate resources where we can not split it up in domains...

In addition, part of the plan is to eventually get to an "active-active" environment for the Oracle databases as part of an HA strategy.. We use the SUN Clustering now for HA. But eventually a server will be the backup for other environments... But keep in mind, this isn't a "one size fits all" environment.. For example-we have separate environments for very specific enterprise applications. We split up the projects by categories and determine if they are a good fit for the enterprise servers. There are very few applications/databases that have not fit this model.....

It's an interesting challenge as the Production DBA's manage these environments. But like "most" DBA's, they're pretty sharp folks.. These guys are working "smarter", not longer....

Greg

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, August 05, 2002 11:39 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

My question exactly: business or pleasure?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: DENNIS WILLIAMS [mailto:DWILLIAMS_at_LIFETOUCH.COM]
> Sent: Monday, August 05, 2002 11:09 AM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
> Subject: RE: 20 Instances 1 Machine
>
>
> Greg - Why do you run 10-30 instances on a machine? Is it technical or
> business factors? Thanks.
>
> Dennis Williams
> DBA
> Lifetouch, Inc.
> dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> Sent: Monday, August 05, 2002 9:04 AM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
>
>
> We do Enterprise Server Resource Sharing here..
>
> We have boxes with 10-30 instances running on them. In some
> cases, we will
> split machine/resources up into domains. And in some
> cases-there are all of
> the databases running on a machine.
>
> In either case, it takes quite a bit of planning to implement
> this type of
> environment. you should engage the SA's (OS, hardware, and
> storage). We have
> a plan here that allows us to implement many instances on the
> same machine
> that prevents mistakes. We also have these machines in a SUN Clustered
> environment so that there is some sense of "HA" involved...
>
> Good Luck
> Greg
>
> -----Original Message-----
> Sent: Friday, August 02, 2002 10:48 AM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
>
>
> I would recommend a Sun E-15k. The best option would be to
> domain it into
> separate virtual boxes so that each instance has it's own
> space. Or, you
> could go the other route and buy a bunch of Ultra-2 machines
> and give each
> database its own box. Or, maybe a blade for each instance?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> Sent: Friday, August 02, 2002 5:23 AM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
>
>
> You also have to consider the OS overhead.
> Putting 20 instances means hundreds of processes.
> Just managing all this at the system level can be resource consuming.
>
> Yechiel Adar
> Mehish
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