It's been a while now since Oracle 11g R2 has been released for Solaris (SPARC). Finally, the software is also available for Solaris (X86).
Installation prerequsites will be documented in Document 169706.1 on support.oracle.com (login required)

The above mentioned document has not yet been updated to reflect the availability on Solaris, so here's a short summary (gleaned from <stage_dir>/database/stage/cvu/cvu_prereq.xml):

The only supported OS version is Solaris 10.

Requirements regarding RAM, swap, disk space, kernel settings and so on are basically the same as for Oracle 11g R1.

The required Solaris packages are the same as well.

Required Patches for Solaris (SPARC):

119963-14, 120753-06, 139574-03
With the Sun Studio 12 Compiler installed, patch 124861-15 is needed as well.

Required Patches for Solaris (X86-64):
137104-02, 139575-03, 139556-08, 120754-06, 119961-05, 119964-14

And before you ask - Yes, it runs on OpenSolaris as well.

What's the impact of virtualization on benchmark results? Well, let's have a look to these two SAP SD 2tier benchmarks:

2009034: Sun Fire x4270, Solaris 10, Solaris Container as Virtualization, 8vCPUs (half the CPUs available in the box), Oracle 10g, EHP4: 2800 SD-User.

2009029: Fujitsu Primergy RX 3000, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, VMWare ESX Server 4.0, 8vCPUs (half the CPUs available in the box), MaxDB 7.8, EHP4: 2056 SD-User.

This leads into two questions:

Do two "half-box" virtual machines one the same box perform better than the full box? Well, obviously no: Due to Intel's Hyper-Threading technology it's complicated to extrapolate from half of a system to a full utilized system. Both benchmarks used 8 virtual CPUs representing 8 of the totally available 16 threads, and not a single CPU. So they will have used 8 cores, but only the first thread of each.

Will the use VMWare mean a significant loss of performance?: Well, obviously yes. Of course, some of the lower performance is caused by the OS. We have already shown in several benchmarks the advantage of Solaris as OS for SAP. But - we speak about a lower performance of 36%, more than one third! So, there is a major impact of the virtualization.

So, congrats to our benchmark team - this is very impressive!

SAP and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries.

The 3rd article of the series 'Getting insights with DTrace' is now online in our in our SAPonSun Wiki. This time we are analyzing a 'performance bottleneck on a SAP application server'. Here are the links to all 3 articles:

'Getting insights with DTrace - Part 1: Analyzing Oracle Logwriter w/ buffered vs. direct I/O'
'Getting insights with DTrace - Part 2: OS version checks (uname) - useful when playing around with SAP on OpenSolaris'
'Getting insights with DTrace - Part 3: Analyzing SAP Appserver I/O'

Congrats to our benchmark team! A new World Record with 8 processors on the two-tier SAP ERP 6.0 enhancement pack 4! Once again, Solaris outperformed Windows, this time again using our large 8 socket AMD machine X4600M2 (see certificate 2009022). Delivering 33230 SAPS / 6050 SD benchmark users, Solaris can keep it advantage to Windows: HP certified 30180 SAPS / 5518 SD benchmark (Certificate 2009009) users using a similar machine (okay, they used 3.1 GHz instead of 2.7 GHz, we used more memory).

You just happen to have an OpenSolaris system idling around and are looking for some use cases? Why not install SAP on it?

SAP and Oracle already provide powerful instrumentation to diagnose problems and performance issues. However, DTrace allows unparalleled deepdive into the system. Read the first article from a new SAPonSun series here: 'Getting insights with DTrace - Part 1' Read the second article here: 'Getting insights with DTrace - Part 2'

Tired of firing up your VirtualBox VM just because you need a SAPGUI on your Solaris/OpenSolaris Desktop? Read on...

Are you planning to stretch your SAN ? Are you considering a Metro Cluster setup based on a DWDM infrastructure ? Are you worried about the additional latency imposed by large distances with respect to database / app performance ? Then you might find this article interesting.

Here's a short how-to.

Once again Solaris outperforms Windows in a 2-tier SAP SD benchmark. This time on new Intel Nehalem based systems. [Read More]

The White Paper "Upgrade- and Patchmanagement in a virtualized Data Center" is now available. At the moment only in german language.

For details please read "Upgrade- und Patchmanagement in einer virtualisierten Betriebsumgebung"

Customers often ask:" How does SAP on Solaris x64 perform compared to SAP on Linux or Windows ?" This posting provides you with a set of facts that prove: Solaris on Sun HW is way ahead of the game. Convince yourself ![Read More]

SAP MDM 7.1 now available on the Solaris x64 platform[Read More]

Introduction...[Read More]