ODA as a Weblogic Appliance ? Or is it better to consider PCA?

I was recently designing an architecture for enterprise applications and databases. 

Yes, we don't have any confusion when it comes to the database tier :) Especially for the enterprise databases, which requires high-end performance, resiliency and fault tolerancy. Independent of the type of workload, the platform that we recommend is Exadata. 

However, recommending a platform for application tier is another subject. Just like for the database tier; for large scale mission critical application environments, which mostly rely on Oracle Weblogic and FMW products, enterprise customers prefer engineered systems. 

Supposing the needs of the database tier are already satisfied with Exadata, the first platform that comes to mind for this kind of an application tier is Exalogic, which provides extreme performance, reliability and scalability for Oracle, Java and other business applications. However; currently I don't see a price for on-prem Exalogic.. I mean, according to the Oracle Engineered Systems Price List -September 25, 2020, Exalogic is not even on sale. Currently this exalogic link ( https://www.oracle.com/engineered-systems/exalogic/index.html) redirect us to https://www.oracle.com/engineered-systems/private-cloud-appliance. 

Yes! the link redirect us to Private Cloud Appliance (PCA). But before we get to that point; we must ask ourselves -> why not Oracle Database Appliance (ODA)?  There are strong E-Business Suite (EBS) references for ODA and I personally migrated several EBS customers to ODA, and Oracle still have several customers using EBS on ODA..  Well, mostly for the mid size EBS customers, we use ODA as a consolidation platform for hosting several EBS Application and databases.

Besides, we know that; although the name implies that it is a Database Appliance, ODA can also function as an Oracle WebLogic Appliance.

However, this context may change based on the real life stories and needs. I mean regardless of having EBS or other applications that rely on Weblogic and FMW, we may want to position an Engineered System for our applications and middleware, and only for them! (considering our database layer may be on Exadata..) 

So is ODA the solution for hosting or consolidating application environments and application environments only ?!?

Well, in fact, even if ODA may be suitable for this scenario, it does not make much sense to use ODA in such a scenario. Especially when we consider the storage mechanism provided for virtual environments on ODA. I mean the GRID, ASM and ACFS that are used for providing it .. These things are pretty simplified on ODA. Correct, but still we find ourselves in the DBA world for hosting Application environments, and for hosting only the applications!

Think about it... You just put applications on Guest VMs of ODA, you don't have any database residing on ODA, but still you maintain GRID, ASM and ACFS.

In addition to that, ODA can not scale out well. That is, when you reach the limits of its capacity, there is the possibility of vertical growth, but unfortunately there is no possibility of horizontal growth.

So this may be a problem for enterprise application environments, especially for large companies.

Okay, now we are here, the new engineered system ( at least it is new for me, as I didn't make any implementation on it, yet..).

Private Cloud Appliance comes into play at this point. It is avaible for on-premises and allows customers to efficiently consolidate business critical middleware and application workloads.

It has an integrated ZFS Storage and Oracle X8-2 servers for management and compute nodes.

It is scalable (up to 1200 cores,  3.3 Pb disk capacity).

It is high available and cloud ready. 

Moreover, PCA can be direct attached to Exadata to provide the lowest latency between Middleware and DB tier.

Virutalization technology used in PCA is OVM. However; we are expecting to have KVM be supported on PCA soon. (Remember what I wrote earlier about this OVM and KVM thing ->https://ermanarslan.blogspot.com/2020/09/end-of-premier-support-of-ovm-it-is.html)

Virtualization on PCA supports Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows Server for Guest Vms.

There is even a tool for automating the migration of virtual machines from VMware vSphere to Oracle VM.

This machine also has strong references.

I can keep writing about PCA, but it's more helpful to have a look yourself.

Check -> https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/private-cloud-appliance.html

Read the Private Cloud Appliance FAQs. 

Check the youtube video -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtv6Mssbnp0 ( Oracle Private Cloud Appliance a.k.a PCA X8)

Very likely, you will think what I think and we will come to the same point.

This is the platform we are looking for large and critical Oracle application environments. 

An Engineered System that can be used to host and consolidate layers to our applications and can bring us many new features and capabilities.

Have a nice weekend :)