Delphix Products

  • 1.  Planning for a POC running multiple RDBMS (MS SQL Server & Oracle)

    Posted 03-29-2017 01:13:00 AM
    Hello everyone,

    Hope you guys are doing well.

    Currently, we're planning a POC that will run both MS SQL Server and Oracle as its primary dSources. As I still have very little experience in handling a Delphix POC (especially setting up an Oracle environment), I would like to ask for your assistance in doing this. I'm well aware of the docs.delphix.com (which is a big help by the way) website but it would really be helpful on my part if you guys can impart some of your experiences and expertise with me. (Thanks in advance!)

    Any advice on how to approach this? What are the most important things to take note of?

    That being said, the main challenge that we'll be dealing with is the amount of the resources they can provide. What would be the lowest (but still acceptable) we can allocate to run a Delphix Engine? (Docs say 64gb for RAM but unfortunately, that's still a reach in this case)

    Lastly, hope I can get a minimum list of requirements that will also serve as a reference for future cases as well.

    Best regards,
    Mark





  • 2.  RE: Planning for a POC running multiple RDBMS (MS SQL Server & Oracle)
    Best Answer

    Posted 03-29-2017 04:35:00 AM
    A POC with one or many RDBMSs can be a complex undertaking. To ensure that the full benefit of the Delphix Engine is realised for your specific use case scenarios, Delphix strongly encourages engaging with our Professional Services team. It would be daunting to contemplate managing purely through the community forum.

    As for the approach, the documentation should be considered the source of truth. The minimum requirements are documented at https://docs.delphix.com/docs/architecture-best-practices

    Areas which are most likely to present problems are implementing the Delphix Engine into an environment that too closely reflects your live infrastructure. Having to deal with LDAP integration, non standard privilege elevation (third party sudo management) on UNIX or cross domain trust policies on Windows greatly complicates things. If possible, keep the POC as simple as possible to demonstrate core functionality and then refine the configuration from there.

    • Go slowly.
    • Use simple highly permissive sudo profiles on UNIX
    • Use the same Windows domain user if possible across all Windows hosts
    • Keep the Oracle and MSSQL implementations as close to plain vanilla configurations as possible (no ASM, PDBs, third party MSSQL backup tools etc).
    • Ensure the source and target hosts are all in the supported OS matrix.

    The Delphix Engine supports a large variety of configurations to make it usable in a wide variety of heterogeneous and fairly idiosyncratic customer environments. However, these do require more advanced planning and implementation and are, if possible, best left for post POC live implementations.

    If you are not in a position to use our Professional Services team, then the advice to keep things simple at first is even more important since any issues will have to be self resolved or via the experiences of the community forum - which is good but our support team is much better equipped to deal with issues. 


  • 3.  RE: Planning for a POC running multiple RDBMS (MS SQL Server & Oracle)
    Best Answer

    Posted 03-29-2017 04:39:00 AM
    As an aside, you can operate the Delphix Engine with much less resources (how much less really depends on how hard you push it). It won't be supported by Delphix, but that might be okay for your POC requirements.


  • 4.  RE: Planning for a POC running multiple RDBMS (MS SQL Server & Oracle)

    Posted 03-29-2017 05:04:00 AM
    Hi Joey,

    Thanks for this. Appreciate the effort of providing me a clear picture of things that I may encounter along the way. Will consider everything that you've said and aim for a much simpler approach and go from there.

    Again, thank you very much.


  • 5.  RE: Planning for a POC running multiple RDBMS (MS SQL Server & Oracle)

    Posted 03-29-2017 01:06:00 PM
    I agree with this.  For a POC which is proving functionality only, you can run a 32 GB VM and defer some of the best practices.  Once you get into performance, you need to implement those best practices and boost your VM CPU and RAM to the minimum requirements.

    If you're on an old 1 Gbps network, you'll be very constrained in performance.  Ditto for cheap and slow storage (SATA).   A small POC often uses only a handful of SATA spindles under the hood of the SAN, which is quite sluggish.  It's not uncommon to see a POC run 10x slower than what you'll eventually build.

    At a bare minimum, you need low latency on the network connection between your Delphix Engine and the Targets (servers running your RDBMS software).  You can test both latency and throughput easily with the network performance tool: https://docs.delphix.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=70321697">https://docs.delphix.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=70321697">https://docs.delphix.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=70321697.  Even for a POC, you need 3ms or less.  Production systems should run at 1ms or less.

    As mentioned, you can work with Professional Services for additional assistance.  You can also reach out to our Sales team, who can help you with the POC, as well as crafting an ROI.


  • 6.  RE: Planning for a POC running multiple RDBMS (MS SQL Server & Oracle)

    Posted 03-30-2017 12:56:00 AM
    Hi Ranzo,

    Thanks for this as well. You guys have been a great help to me. With this, it'll be easier for me to relay this to our potential Delphix users.