An Oracle White Paper

May 2011

Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment:

Capacity Planning
 Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 3
Oracle BI EE Components .............................................................................................. 4
Oracle BI EE Server Environment ................................................................................... 4
BI Sizing Assumptions .............................................................................................. 4
1) Small Size Oracle BI EE implementation .............................................................. 6
2) Medium Size Oracle BI EE implementation .......................................................... 6
3) Large Size Oracle BI EE implementation ............................................................. 8
Network Requirements .............................................................................................. 10
Clustering, Load Balancing, and Fail over in Oracle Business Intelligence ................... 10
Backup and Disaster Recovery .................................................................................. 10
Logical Partitioning, Virtualization & HW resources partitioning ................................. 11
Appendix A: Useful metrics to monitor .......................................................................... 12
Key BI Metrics......................................................................................................... 12
Operating System Server Resources Utilization Statistics...................................... 12
Network data........................................................................................................... 12
Database Server ..................................................................................................... 13
Web Servers and Application Server ...................................................................... 13
Appendix B: BI Sizing Spreadsheet .............................................................................. 15
11g Sizing Spreadsheet.......................................................................................... 15
Concurrent Users.................................................................................................... 15
Appendix C: Processing a Capacity Plan ...................................................................... 17
Locate and Resolve Over-Utilized Resources ........................................................ 17
Resolve High-Latency Transactions ....................................................................... 17
Address Under-Utilized Resources ......................................................................... 18
Final Analysis.......................................................................................................... 18
REFERENCE:......................................................................................................... 19

2
 Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity

Planning
Introduction
The objective of this paper is providing performance sizing information for Oracle Business Intelligence
Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) 11g (11.1.1.5+).

Business Intelligence (BI) Systems are usually complex and read intensive. Performance in a BI system is
measured in a number of areas; the response time navigating from reports, to and from dashboards, and
physical query response time. User-centric BI has moved information systems from the hands of
developers into the hands of the masses making BI a mission critical system where reliability, availability
and serviceability are the only consideration in capacity planning.
In general there are two forms of capacity planning:
 Performance Sizing (Pre-configuration/Pre-Installation)
 Deployment (Post-configuration)

Performance sizing or pre-configuration capacity planning, involves determining the hardware required to
process a given workload. A reliable benchmark is used as the baseline for a given workload on a
system. This produces performance statistics that display expected results of the workload’s impact on a
system on the same or similar hardware.

Deployment capacity planning is a complex and ongoing performance study of hardware and software
resource consumption on a deployed system. These studies are primarily established to provide capacity
data to the system administrator, DBA, and other stakeholders about the utilization of the system.

There are a number of factors that impacts performance in a BI system. Those areas include:

 Physical hardware
 Database Performance
 Network
 Database and BI model
 BI system configuration
 Application Server Performance
 Deployment architecture and topology

The performance test that BI sizing is based upon tries to represent a customer scenario where the user
population is divided between administrative users and business users. The typical workload scenarios
demonstrate 95% of business users viewing reports and navigating within dashboards. The remaining 5%
of the concurrent users are categorized as administrative users or users performing application
development. The mix of reports include varying business user roles utilizing a mix of dashboards, charts,
tables, drill-downs, and pivot tables that return a number of rows (anywhere from 5-500) of aggregated
data. Administrative users include users performing concurrent application development and ad-hoc
reporting; i.e. navigating catalogs, creating new reports, modifying existing reports, and saving reports.
Sizing will take into consideration the user population, concurrent users, users using formatted reports,
and Scorecard.

The primary purpose of this paper is to present the OBIEE 11g Sizing Spreadsheet from pre-installation
capacity planning perspective. This paper will introduce topics that impacts performance with pointers to
the BI documentation where more detailed information is available. Finally, the paper will provide

3
 Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

architectural examples of small, medium, and large BI systems for the purpose of demonstrating how a BI
System could be deployed.

Oracle BI EE Components
The Oracle Business Intelligence components consist of:
 Oracle Business Intelligence Presentation Services
o Ad-hoc query and reporting, highly interactive dashboards for accessing business
intelligence and applications
 Oracle Business Intelligence Server
o Common enterprise business model and abstraction layer
 Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher
o Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher generates highly-formatted, pixel-perfect
enterprise reports
 Oracle Business Intelligence Javahost
o The Oracle Business Intelligence Javahost provides services to BI Presentation Services
for Charts, Gauges and PDFs.
 Fusion Middleware Control
o Fusion Middleware Control is the browser-based management tool used to manage,
monitoring, and configure Oracle Business Intelligence components

Oracle BI EE Server Environment

Hardware resources have an impact on the overall deployment and performance optimization and sizing
of the Oracle BI EE environment. The following section discusses some of the key HW characteristics that
should be correctly measured and sized:

CPU/Cores
Hardware vendors are required to list the following in the category of Number of CPU’s:
 Chips
 Cores
 Cores/Chip
For example: 1 Intel Xeon E5620, Quad-Core, 2.40 GHz configured as part of the Sun X2270 M2.

A core is the equivalent to a CPU. Modern Server processors include 1 CPU that may include 2 or more
cores.

Multithreading
Processors also have the ability to run multiple threads per core which results in performance gains.

Clock Speed
More powerful and modern CPUs support higher workloads. This correlates to the amount of memory in a
system which increases the amount of memory linearly.

As an example a machine with 2CPUs/4Core @ 2.8GHz and 16GB RAM would provide higher capacity
and utilization that a dual processor system.

BI Sizing Assumptions

This section contains BI Sizing assumptions to consider when using data based on the BI Sizing
Spreadsheet. See Appendix B The Small, Medium, and Large Architectures are also based on this
information.

4
 Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

The users that place a load the OBIEE system are those who are actually performing processing. These
users are termed concurrent users. The number of concurrent users is based on the total named user
population and determining a percentage of concurrent users:

 Total named users

 This is the complete user population that will be utilizing the targeted hardware

 Concurrent users

 This is the maximum percent of users in the total user population that will be active at any
one time

 We do not calculate active users or users logged into the system not actively demanding
system resources.

 Deploying SSL will have a level of overhead on the overall performance

 Formatting of reports has overhead on the system verse executing HTML based reports only (i.e.
Dashboards)

 In the case of single core chips, the recommendation is to deploy a minimum of 2 CPU's given
the contention of all the OBI EE processes. For modern multi-core chips one CPU can be
recommend, however, 1CPU should NOT be recommended for single-core chips

 Note: Multi-Core CPU’s are replacing single and dual core CPU’s in Server applications
making the availability of those processors rare in newer Servers.

 The hardware assumptions are based on capacity of the Oracle BI EE components only and NOT
the database. Recommended sizing for Essbase can be found in Chapter 4 of the following
documentation:
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/epm_install_start_here_11121.pdf

 Upgrading the hardware of the Oracle BI EE environment will not necessarily make queries run
faster. Good query performance generally assumes good DB design and/or aggregation
strategies.

 Scaling scenarios are performed against a chipset verses the operating system environment. As
an example for an Intel P4 we size similarly for both Windows and Linux. This sizing data
represents Windows and Linux.

User concurrency varies over the lifecycle of the deployment and is impacted by many factors. As a BI
environment becomes more mature the system can grow from being low named users with a high
percentage of concurrent users to higher named users and lower concurrency yet demanding more
hardware capacity. Initial sizing helps in determining what is required and how to process demand over
time.

To determine the BI capacity requirements, collect the following information:

 BI users (Reporting, Dashboards, etc)

 The number of BI users you expect to have, and when you expect them to use OBIEE.

 Infrastructure, and Architecture complexity (SSL, BIP, etc)

 Assess the complexity of the processing that users will demand of BI and the design of
the architecture and infrastructure.

5
 Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

Capacity planning is an ongoing process. After deploying and implementing OBIEE the systems needs to
be monitored to ensure the performance expectations are met.

It is worth noting that sizing guidelines for the small, medium, and large implementation are for OBIEE components only
and not for typical implementation which could include BI Applications or other Oracle technology.

1) Small Size Oracle BI EE implementation

The estimated hardware for a small sized Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition
implementation can be utilized for a wide range of concurrent users. For a typical implementation the
estimated HW specifications required to support 100-200 total and 10-20 concurrent users could
technically meet the needs required to support < 3000 total users at 10% concurrency resulting in < 300
concurrent users. A small sized system can be characterized as:
 x86 CPU 2-4 Cores with the recommended 2GB of RAM per Core
 < 1200 Concurrent Users

Figure 1: Example HW System Specs Description

1. Database Server: (Oracle 11g/IBM DB2/Microsoft SQL Server/Teradata database servers)
2. Oracle BI Server OS (ex: Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5)
a. Oracle BI Server
b. Oracle BI Presentation Server
c. Oracle BI Publisher
d. Oracle WebLogic Server
3. Web Server (Oracle HTTP Server)
4. Identity Management Access Management Server

2) Medium Size Oracle BI EE implementation

6
 Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

Due to the scalability and performant nature of OBIEE a medium sized implementation covers a wide
range and overlaps with the small sized system and large sized systems in regards to the kind of
hardware that can be used to accomplish the business need.

While the HW specifications for a typical medium sized OBIEE implementation can support 1000-5000
total and 100-500 concurrent users, hardware sizing for medium sized implementations are characterized
as systems between 1200 and 5000 concurrent users:
 x86 CPU 4-16 Cores with the recommended 2GB of RAM per Core
 1200 – 5000 Concurrent Users
BI Suites Components
Example HW System Specs Description

Figure 2: Medium Configuration displaying clustered BI Server components

7
 Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

1. Database Server: (Oracle 11g/IBM DB2/Microsoft SQL Server/Teradata database servers)- In a

medium sized implementation database clustering and scalability is expected
2. Oracle BI Server OS (ex: Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5) -
a. Oracle BI Server (OBIS+n)
b. Oracle BI Presentation Server (OBIPS+n)
c. Oracle BI Publisher
d. Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS+n)
3. Web Server (Oracle HTTP Server + Load Balancer)
4. Identity Management Access Management Server

3) Large Size Oracle BI EE implementation

A large number of concurrent users can be deployed on the typical large sized Oracle BI EE system. The
estimated HW for a large sized Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition that is capable of
supporting 50,000 or more total and 5000 or more concurrent users are as follows:
 x86 CPU 16+ Cores with the recommended 2GB of RAM per Core
 5000+ Concurrent Users

BI Suites Components

8
 Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

Example HW System Specs Description

Figure 3: Example of Large implementation

1. Database Server: (Oracle 11g/IBM DB2/Microsoft SQL Server/Teradata database servers)- In a
medium sized implementation database clustering and scalability is expected
2. Oracle BI Server OS (ex: Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5) – the overall BI implementation should be
deployed in a highly available configuration. For a large configuration OBIEE is implemented into
an environment where maximum availability architecture (MAA) best practices are in place.
a. Oracle BI Server (OBIS+n)
b. Oracle BI Presentation Server (OBIPS+n)
c. Oracle BI Publisher
d. Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS+n)
3. Web Server (Oracle HTTP Server + Load Balancer)
4. Identity Management Access Management Server

9
 Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

Network Requirements
It is recommended to deploy the BI servers on a dedicated subnet using > 100 MBPS (1Gbit if possible)
to reduce latency between each server.

11g
HTTP Response
HTTP Response Size with Compression
Size Compression ratio
Pages (Kbytes) (KB) (%)
Dashboard with 3
Tables and 3 Charts

(each table has

5~10rows, 3~5 cols) 297.5 39 86
Dashboard with 1 Table
(25rows , 10 columns) 210 28.5 86
Dashboard with 1 Large
Table (300rows , 10
columns) 938 79 91

For the compression mentioned above the compression/decompression occurs between the client
browser and HTTP server (usually Oracle HTTP Server (based on Apache 2.2)). The compression is
performed by Apache 2.2 which has a compression module. Compression has minimal impact on the
CPU of the HTTP server.

Clustering, Load Balancing, and Fail over in Oracle Business Intelligence

This document does not cover methods used to attain and maintain a required capacity, utilization, and
availability. In-depth documentation for Clustering and High Availability can be found in the following
documents:

Configuring Business Intelligence for High Availability:

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E21764_01/core.1111/e10106/bi.htm#sthref2545

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E21764_01/bi.1111/e10541/highavail.htm#BABIFFCA

Scaling Your Deployment:

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E21764_01/bi.1111/e10541/cluster.htm#BGBHFCJF

Enterprise Deployment Guide for Oracle BI

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E21764_01/doc.1111/e15722/toc.htm

Load Balancing HTTP Server

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E15523_01/core.1111/e12036/install.htm#CBHDDEFJ

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Database Data and Application Data

10
 Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

Backup and Recovery of OBIEE Application data will include configuration data, Metadata repository,
Web Catalog and other Application Configuration files. See:
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E21764_01/core.1111/e10105/br_intro.htm#CHDJBDDE

Logical Partitioning, Virtualization & HW resources partitioning

http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/virtualization/index.html

11
 Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

Appendix A: Useful metrics to monitor

The OBIEE documentation contains key metrics and information about monitoring the BI performance
and health:
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E21764_01/bi.1111/e10541/querycaching.htm#CHDEJBBE

Key BI Metrics

o Request Processing Time (ms)

o SOA Request Processing Time (ms)
o Average Query Time (seconds)
o Active Sessions
o Requests (per minute)
o SOA Requests (per minute)
o Presentation Server Requests (per second)
o Server Queries (per second)
o Failed Queries
o Errors Reported (in the last hour)

Operating System Server Resources Utilization Statistics

o % Privileged Time
 The percentage of time the operating system was busy
o CPU data
 % Processor Time
• The percentage of time the processor was busy
o Available memory in Bytes
 The amount of free space in memory
o Memory data
o Page Faults per sec
 The number of page fault per sec.
• (Page faults are normal system occurrences that used to retrieve data
from the disk. If the system needs certain code page and it is in memory,
a logical I/O occurs. The data is read from the memory the transaction
that needs data is processed. If the code page or data page is not in the
memory, the system performs a physical I/O to read the needed page
from the disk. This is accomplished through page faulting.)
o Pages/sec
 The number of actual pages being moved from disk to memory or back to disk.
Only data
 pages are written back to disk when they are modified Code pages do not get
modified

Network data
o Current Network bandwidth
 The current size of the line e.g. 10 Mbps or Gbit
o User Activity Server Sessions
 The number of user sessions currently going on within the server
o Bytes Received/sec
 The number of bytes received by this system per second, averaged over the
interval period
o Bytes Sent/sec
 The number of bytes sent by this system per second, averaged over time interval

12
 Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

o Bytes Total/sec
 The total number of bytes sent and received by this system per second,
averaged over time interval. It comprises of the sum of Bytes Received/sec and
Bytes Sent/sec

Database Server
 Disk I/O data
o % Disk Read Time
 The percentage of time that the disk was busy performing a read function
o % Disk Write Time
 The percentage of time that the disk was busy performing a write function
o % Disk Time
 The percentage of time that the disk was busy performing read or write functions
o Avg. Disk Queue Length
 The actual disk queue for read and write operations
o Disk sec/Read
 The average time (in milliseconds) a read operation takes. This time is important
because prolonged read and write operation indicate an over utilized disk
o Disk sec/Write
 The average time (in milliseconds) a write operation takes. This time is important
because prolonged read and write operation indicate an over utilized disk
 Database Data
o Buffer Cache Hit Ratio
 The percentage of time that a record was found in cache
o Database User Connections
 The number of users connected to this database
o Query/sec
 The number of transactions started for the database
o Percent Log Used
 The percentage of the log that is used

Web Servers and Application Server

 Web Servers
o Request Throughput
 throughput requests per second and response times in seconds per request
o Current Connections
 The number of current connections to the Web server
o Connection Attempts/sec
 shows the number of attempts to connect the Web server
o Anonymous Users
 count of users that established a connection with the Web Server since service
started
o Total Accesses
 information on the total number of hits on the Apache HTTP Server
o Total Traffic
 information about the total bytes sent and received by the Apache HTTP Server
o CPU Load
 information about the total CPU time consumed by the Apache HTTP Server
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17904_01/core.1111/e10108/http.htm
 Application Servers
o % Processor Time
 The percentage of processor time
o Elapsed Time
 The time, in seconds, that the process instance has been running
o I/O Data Operations

13
 Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

 The number of read and write operations generated by the process instance
o Request Throughput
 throughput requests per second and response times in seconds per request
o Server Response Time
 Average response times and request rates
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12840_01/wls/docs103/perform/

14
 Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

Appendix B: BI Sizing Spreadsheet

11g Sizing Spreadsheet
The 11g Sizing Spreadsheet as described in the BI Sizing Assumptions section of this paper.

Figure 4

Concurrent Users

The following table is based on the spreadsheet in figure 4. It is based on the minimal requirements. The
total named users is set, SSL is not selected, Scorecard analysis is not considered, and user concurrency
is determined to be 10%. The result is the Estimated CPU/CORE required.

15
Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

16
 Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

Appendix C: Processing a Capacity Plan

This document does not intend to address actions to resolve production Capacity planning for OBIEE but
it does present a generic roadmap:

1. Resolve over-utilized resources.

2. Address high-latency transitions.
3. Address under-utilized resources.
4. Present a final analysis.

Locate and Resolve Over-Utilized Resources

In the capacity planning processing over capacity or under utilization can occur when determining the
sizing between small to medium and medium to large configurations. In all scenarios the Oracle expert
services team is recommended to provide in depth analysis. During the process some hardware
resources can be recognized as over-utilized. Resource over utilization causes performance issues by
placing unnecessary burdens on the OS to manage resources which in the end impacts the BI Application
performance. In this case it is important to determine the over-utilized resources and address how the
problems can be resolved. Some factors include:

 How much the resource is over-utilized

 Criticality of the transactions or roles on the over-utilized resource
 Expense of adding additional resources
With the monitoring of OBIEE via FMW Control, OS management tools, and other management tools,
some changes that might be considered include the following:

 Adding new resources to existing servers

o RAM, CPU, etc
 Adding new servers and assigning components to them
o Scale out/cluster OBIEE Components
 Changing application settings and usage profiles
o Utilize capabilities within OBIEE via the common management framework
A trial and error process may be required to correct over utilization and repeating the process above until
utilization is optimal.

Resolve High-Latency Transactions

During the capacity planning process, system use, design and model design is usually an under-
appreciated aspect of the planning. When planning, it is worthy to note transactions with high latency to
be able to determine the order in which these problems will be addressed. Factors that influence the
priority of a particular latency issue might include the following:

 Significance of the transactions to the business

 How will users be impacted by high cost transactions and set plans to alleviate impact
 Pre-planning to counteract high-latency transactions can include acknowledging the
importance of Report scheduling and user profiling/usage governance

17
 Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

Resolution of high-latency transactions is a costly portion of capacity planning. Items that can impact
latency include the following for potential changes:

 Inquire about network bandwidth and the impact it may have on reducing transaction time
 Redistributing application components to other servers
 Changing application settings, such as BI caching

Address Under-Utilized Resources

Another key in capacity planning is preparing for the potential of resources that can be identified as
under-utilized. The objective is to prepare for what could be deemed as excess resources that may or
may not impact utilization or transaction latencies.

In many deployments and capacity planning exercises the prospect of under-utilized resources is not the
primary determining factor in the planning. Some items are crucial and impactful when considering the
small to medium to large implementation without negative impact to the enterprise architecture some of
those areas include:

 Security
 Availability and Elasticity to handle peak volumes
 Future growth and Planned growth
 Stability
To plan the optimization of resources at a site, the following should be noted:

 Engage Expert Services

 Recognize the fine line between a small, medium, and large configurations
 The potential for hardware reuse or optimal hardware use exist

To reduce and prevent under-utilized resources the direct path is to reduce the hardware sizing. In this
case it would be difficult to determine if the overall performance would be impacted beyond an acceptable
level.

Final Analysis
Whether dealing with a workload based on simple queries with a small dataset to complex queries with
enormous datasets, optimal results that start with results obtained from the OBIEE Performance,
Scalability and Reliability (PSR) team and ends with Professional Services can provide a scenario where
capacity planning helps with the following:

 Maximize availability
 Optimize utilization
 Minimize the Total Cost Of Ownership
 Maximize Return on Investment

18
 Oracle BI EE Architectural Deployment: Capacity Planning

REFERENCE:
http://www.specbench.org/
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596518585
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_deflate.html
http://www.spec.org/
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E14571_01/bi.htm

Oracle BI EE Architectural Deploymnet Copyright © 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only and the
Capacity Planning contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other
May 2011 warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or
Author: fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document and no contractual obligations are
Contributing Authors: formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission.
Oracle Corporation
Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
World Headquarters
AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices.
500 Oracle Parkway
Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license
Redwood Shores, CA 94065
and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark licensed through X/Open
U.S.A.
Company, Ltd. 1010

Worldwide Inquiries:
Phone: +1.650.506.7000
Fax: +1.650.506.7200

oracle.com

19