Automic Workload Automation

Hi guys, long time no see!

We are in the middle of building up our new system environment for AE V11 and I wonder if any of you has a similar setup and can share some experience.
https://us.v-cdn.net/5019921/uploads/editor/p2/vz6xx7abm0ss.png" width="617">
Our new environment is roughly shown in the draft above. All of the serves will be virtual running on an VMware ESX. Unfortunately we can’t wait till Windows Server 2016 is standardised in our shop so we have to go with 2012. The DB will be a MSSQL 2014 Enterprise Edition.

To prevent oversizeing we will start with relatively weak VMs and add more capacity quickly when we need it. My server team assured me that the VMs, running on our newest hardware and storage, outperform older physicals by far.

To improve performance, we can add more capacity to the VMs or scale them horizontally by adding more VMs. Unfortunately, with the current active-passive configuration of the DB, scaling horizontally only makes sense for the APP-Servers.


Here are my questions:

1) Do you run on VMs and how was your experience going form physical to virtual?

2) Do you have some major concerns by looking at this environment?

3) This is the most important question: Do you know about the possibility to scale the DB-VMs horizontally? That could ether be by:

    - Splitting the DB into two or more parts and running an active-active cluster. (I think, is not possible with the AE-DB.)

    - Using the passive DB host for read only transactions. If the applications supports this, it could e.g. send statistic queries from some user to the second host and therefore not get in the way of the productive system (e.g. scheduling, job generation, ..).


Thanks in advance, I appreciate any comment!

We've always run ours on Windows VM's.  Pretty simple/small shop here with just 2 servers;

DEV-server contains Dev-AE and Dev-SQLServer
PROD-server contains PROD-AE and PROD-SQLServer

Each server has the AE installed on C, and the DB installed on D.

My systems engineers tell me these VMs are backed up daily.  Since we are a small shop, I don't think we have done anything special to our SQLServer instances other than keep them well tuned.

We've had our servers and Agents on Linux VM's since we started on V9 in 2012. We have two servers in production with 10 WP's. Database is Oracle 12 on Exadata with a standby database. We've also experimented with Oracle on blade servers with Data Guard, but our DBA's feel that the maintenance and administration has a higher overhead.

We are working on a backup data center to provide High Availability. We will want two more AE servers and another Exadata appliance with the AE servers running Active-Active with our main data center.

If the purpose of your backup data center is for DR and not HA, you are probably going to be fine.

Your primary VM's need to be built on separate hardware clusters and they need to have "anti-affinity" rules, so that both servers are never running on the same hardware cluster.