Exalogic - when you need Weblogic on Steroids
May 02, 2017
Exalogic - when you need Weblogic on Steroids
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Exalogic
Currently, as a consulting company, we have implemented and are implementing Oracle Exalogic for several of our customers. We also support customers who are existing users of Exalogic. Customers generally purchase Oracle Exalogic for specific use cases then depending on circumstances the portfolio of applications migrated to Exalogic often expands. Usually, Oracle applications that are WebLogic based and are business critical or mission critical are the first to be moved to the Exalogic Platform.
- Because Exalogic uses SR-IOV it is the only virtualization technology that can provide wire sped transfers to the virtual machines. This enables performance indistinguishable from physical machines.
- Since Exalogic comes as a integrated engineered system the maintenance is much more codified. This reduces vendor finger pointing and guarantees that things will either work well with each other from the get go or will be speedily resolved. The ability to have that level of confidence in the stability of a platform is very encouraging for customers.
- Oracle has provided special optimizations specifically for Weblogic. There are special communication protocols that are enabled when Exalogic communicates to an Oracle Database Running on the Exadata Database Machine that multiply benefits. things like RAC aware databse connections allow quick recovery in case of loss of a database node with minimal disruption to individual transactions and no loss in availability of the overall applications.
- Currently, the management of Exalogic is a little arcane. There is a good chance that Oracle can bring flexibility into the control stack because we have seen changes with each version of the software Echo was an improvement and foxtrot even more so. The ability to easily change VM shapes was another welcome change.
- Again the fact arises that to build a very high performance machine there will be idiosyncrasies and a certain amount of retraining may be required. I think this is one area where Exalogic lacks not as a product but as a solution is that there isn't as much good knowledge available about it as there is for other engineered systems.
- The Exalogic default setup could do with an SSD storage option, currently the onboard comes with a spinning disk.
- For our clients who have deployed Exalogic, they have seen a many-fold reduction in the time for critical business processes.
- Backups have been reduced by 20 times, snap clones and replication have created a more robust DR solution.
- The processing capacity on the new Exadata Exalogic combined system is at least 7 times faster than their original system.
Cisco UCS, Vblock and other hyper-converged systems exist but they are generally geared towards general purpose computing and not to any particular stack, hence they act as a jack of all trades and master of none. The Exadata Exalogic combination takes a specific tech stack based on Oracle db and WebLogic and accelerates it to the maximum possible. By concentrating on a specific stack which is nonetheless very popular Oracle has managed to create a unique niche that other hyper-converged architectures cannot compete with.