Exalogic - How To Enable Exalogic Optimizations For WebLogic Server Running On Exalogic Machine (Doc ID 1373571.1)

Last updated on MAY 24, 2021

Applies to:

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software - Version 1.0.0.0.0 and later
Oracle Solaris on x86-64 (64-bit)
Linux x86-64
This document is applicable for WebLogic Server version 10.3.4 and above running on Exalogic Platform (all PSU's).

Goal

This document provides information and detailed configuration steps with screenshots and sample output snippets on how to enable Exalogic Optimizations for WebLogic Domain running on Exalogic Middleware Cloud machine.

Overview of Exalogic Optimizations

The Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software encapsulates a set of enhancements made to Oracle WebLogic Suite, for optimized performance when running on Exalogic hardware. The WebLogic Suite of products enhanced are the WebLogic Application Server, the JRockit Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the Coherence In-Memory Data Grid. The software optimizations address performance limitations that only become apparent when the software is running on Exalogic's high-density computing nodes and fast-networking InfiniBand switches. With these software optimizations, the WebLogic Suite of products can utilize the benefits of this high-end hardware to the maximum, resulting in a well balanced hardware-software engineered system.

For doing Exalogic optimizations for WebLogic Domain running on Exalogic platform we enable Domain-Level Enhancements, Cluster-Level Session Replication Enhancements and configure Grid Link Data Source. Below is information on these features.

Domain Level Enhancements

With Domain Level Enhancements enabled individual features described in below table are enabled. The Startup Option column indicates how to independently enable and disable each feature.

Feature	Description	Startup Option	MBean
Scattered Reads	Increased efficiency during I/O in environments with high network throughput	-Dweblogic.ScatteredReadsEnabled=true/false	KernelMBean.setScatteredReadsEnabled
Gathered Writes	Increased efficiency during I/O in environments with high network throughput	-Dweblogic.GatheredWritesEnabled=true/false	KernelMBean.setGatheredWritesEnabled
Lazy Deserialization	Increased efficiency with session replication	-Dweblogic.replication.enableLazyDeserialization=true/false	ClusterMBean.setSessionLazyDeserializationEnabled
Self Tuning Thread Pool Optimization	Increased efficiency of the self tuning thread pool by aligning it with the Exalogic's processor architecture threading capabilities	Not applicable	KernelMBean.addWorkManagerThreadsByCpuCount

Cluster-Level Session Replication Enhancements

As part of this feature Weblogic server utilises the high speed InfiniBand Fabric bandwidth available between clustered servers for doing session replication and failover tasks. With this WebLogic server replicates more of the session data in parallel, over the network to a second server, using parallel socket connections (parallel "RJVMs") instead of just a single connection. WebLogic also avoids a lot of the unnecessary processing that usually takes place on the server receiving session replicas, by using "lazy de-serialisation". With the help of the underlying JRockit JVM, WebLogic skips the host node's TCP/IP stack, and uses InfiniBand's faster native networking protocol, called SDP, to enable the session payloads to be sent over the network with lower latency. As a result, for stateful web applications requiring high availability, end-user requests are responded to far quicker.

Grid Link Data Source

For Exalogic, WebLogic includes a new component called Active Gridlink for RAC that provides application server connectivity to Oracle RAC clustered databases. This supersedes the existing WebLogic capability for Oracle RAC connectivity, commonly referred to as Multi-Data-Sources. Active Gridlink provides intelligent Runtime Connection Load-Balancing (RCLB) across RAC nodes based on the current workload of each RAC node, by subscribing to the database's Fast Application Notification (FAN) events using Oracle Notification Services (ONS). Active Gridlink uses Fast Connection Failover (FCF) to enable rapid RAC node failure detection for greater application resilience (using ONS events as an input). Active GridLink also allows more transparent RAC node location management with support for SCAN and uses RAC node affinity for handling global (XA) transactions more optimally. Consequently, enterprise Java applications involving intensive database work, achieve a higher level of availability with better throughput and more consistent response times.

Note: In this note for demonstration purpose we take WebLogic 10.3.4 Domain with UNICAST cluster having 2 Managed servers running on 2 compute nodes - Admin and 1 Managed server on one compute node and another managed server on different compute node. For Gridlink datasource configuration we use SCAN address for connecting to backend Oracle RAC DB instances.