#Exalogic for Beginners
This post covers overview of Exalogic Machine from Oracle’s Exa Family (Exadata and Exalytics are other two products from Exa family)
Exalogic is pre-configured Hardware Machine with Operating System and Fusion Middleware (Weblogic 11g, Coherence, JRockit/Hotspot, Grid Control to manage WebLogic).
Note: FMW Applications like SOA, WebCenter , OBIEE, IAM are NOT part of default Exalogic Machine. You can install these products on Exalogic Server separately.
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Hardware in Exalogic includes
a) Compute Nodes: These compute nodes provide processing to application and are collection of 30 Sun Fire M2 servers (each compute node consisting of CPU, RAM, FlashFire Solid State Disk/SSD, Inifiniband Ports and GB Ethernet Ports)
b) Storage Appliances : These provide storage disk for applications to store data and collection of up to 20 disks.
Note: Operating System is installed on Solid State Disk (SSD) on compute node and NOT on storage appliance
c) InfiniBand Switches : Connect to Host Channel Adapters (HCA) of Compute Nodes. These switches also act as Ethernet Gateway to connect Exalogic to external LAN over ethernet.
d) InfiniBand Fabric: 32 Gb/second InfiniBand Quad Data Rate (QDR) fabric for exalogic internal communication.
- Applications running on one compute node communicates with applications running on another compute node using this InfiniBand network.
- Exalogic machines communicate with Oracle Exadata Database Machines for database connectivity via IPoIB (IP over InfiniBand)
e) Management Switch : For management traffic to monitor and manage Exalogic and application.
e) Power Distribution Unit (PDU)
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Quarter/Half/Full/Multi Rack
Exalogic Server is available in
a) Quarter Rack (8 Compute Nodes, 786 GB RAM, 1 storage appliance)
b) Half Rack (16 Compute Nodes, 1.5 TB RAM, 1 storage appliance)
c) Full Rack (30 Compute Nodes, 2.8 TB RAM, 1 storage appliance)
d) Multi Rack : You can connect up to eight Full racks to make Multi Rack Exalogic Server using InifiniBand (Spine Module)
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Other Key Points to Exalogic
1. Solid State Disk on Compute Nodes is used for Operating System only
2. Disks on Storage Appliances are used to store application files and application data
3. InfiniBand provides network connectivity between compute nodes and storage appliances
4. Management switches isolates management & monitoring traffic from client traffic
5. Exalogic (hosting Fusion Middleware) can also be connected to Exadata (hosting Database) using Infiniband (without need of any external switches)
6. Exalogic currently supports two operating systems Oracle Linux and Solaris Express
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