If, like me, you only have a limited amount of time to browse the multitude of web sites, blogs, journals and news feeds out there, you may have missed some interesting Oracle collateral that my colleagues at Sun have produced. So to help reduce your information overload, I thought I'd highlight them in this post.

As Oracle 11g is growing in importance, let's start there. Both Solaris Cluster and Sun ISV engineering have been working with Oracle 11g now for some considerable time. We've invested a lot of resources in integration and stress testing it to make sure it works seamlessly with Solaris Cluster. The results of these efforts are captured in the "Sun Reference Architecture for Oracle 11g Grid" whitepaper. From a personal standpoint, I find the performance characterization of various networking and file system options the most interesting material as it really demonstrates the breadth of choice Solaris Cluster gives you: 1GbE, 10GbE, Infiniband, ASM, shared QFS, etc.

If you've not kept up with the progress in Solaris Cluster's support for virtualization, then you may not have seen Dr Ellard Roush's excellent "Zone Clusters — How to Deploy Virtual Clusters and Why" Blueprint. If you want to consolidate your Oracle RAC workloads to maximise the system utilisation, then this, together with the "Deploying Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) on Solaris Zone Clusters", co-authored with Gia-Khanh Nguyen, are papers you must read.

Following a similar theme, Alexandre Chartre, Daniel Dibbets, and Roman Ivanov have written "Running Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) on Sun Logical Domains". This Blueprint describes the best practice for setting up Oracle Clusterware on LDoms. Having this perform reliably is a requirement and precursor to gaining Oracle support for the same configuration running under Solaris Cluster, with all the well known benefits that Solaris Cluster brings.

Finally, if there was ever any doubt that SPARC/Solaris was the most scalable and performant platform for Oracle, the "Performance and Scalability Benchmark: Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management on Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 and M8000 Servers Running the Solaris 10 OS" Blueprint describes how you can bring the best of Sun technologies: ZFS, Solaris Containers, Dynamic System Domains, together to provide highly scalable Communications Billing and Revenue Management solution.

Hopefully, one or more of these will be of use or interest to you. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us through the blog or via the Solaris Cluster forum. We're always happy to help.

Tim Read
Solaris Cluster Engineering