AWS Route 53 domain name configuration

When entering in the A records for your hosted zone (for example: migrating2cloud.com), you need to create two type A-IPv4 address record sets.  One for www.migrating2cloud.com and the other for migrating2cloud.com.  These A type records sets should point to your EC2 Elastic IP Address or ELB CName (or Hosted Zone ID).

AWS IAM Service

AWS IAM is not for application level security.  IAM is a control plane for AWS Services. For example, you can create an IAM user to limit access to the AWS web console.  For application security, you continue to use an LDAP server or your own identity management solution.

Cross region AWS Services

There are a few AWS services that are cross region:

• IAM
• Cloud Front
• Route 53

Oracle EBusiness Suite sizing

Here is some public information for sizing of Oracle EBusiness Suite.

The Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 requires at least 2GB of 3GB would be better and 4GB even better: http://gerardnico.com/wiki/ebs/installation

The installation recommended the minimum of 6 GB memory for Ebusiness Suite 12.1.3 according to Oracle documention: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B53825_08/current/acrobat/121upgrade.pdf.  For the upgrade test used in this example, a machine for the middle tier/application had 4 CPUs.    The database tier upgrade example in this document used a 24 CPU machine.

Here is some other sizing information that can help
1.  https://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/entry/ebs_sizing_primer   
2. http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/benchmark/apps-benchmark/index.html - all results http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/benchmark/apps-benchmark/results-166922.html

        Go directly to report results for this benchmark : http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/benchmark/apps-benchmark/hp-dl585-2100-16-core-166452.pdf

Database Tier:
Hewlett-Packard® ProLiant® DL585 G5 server equipped with 4 x 2.7 GHz Quad-Core AMD® Opteron™ 8384 processors.

128 GB of memory
Applications Tier:
3 x Hewlett- Packard® BL685c server blades. Each server equipped with 4 x 3.0 GHz Dual-Core AMD® Opteron® 8222 processors.

32 GB of memory

Online: 2,100 Users
Batch: 50,000 Order Lines
10,000 Payroll Employees

Be aware that Oracle E-Business Fusion Applications require a minimum of 128 GB of memory. http://onlineappsdba.com/index.php/2011/11/02/fusion-applications-128-gb-memory-and-500-gb-disk-space-are-you-ready/

Oracle APEX on AWS Oracle RDS

Oracle APEX on AWS Oracle RDS requires the APEX HTTP Listener to be installed on an EC2 Instance.  It also requires the that the Oracle RDS instance is setup to run APEX.  This is done by adding an APEX XMLDB option group to the Oracle RDS Instance.  Details can be found here:
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/08/additional-rds-features-oracle-xml-db-and-oracle-application-express-apex.html

Currently, AWS Oracle RDS supports APEX 4.11.

AWS Boston User Group

Great session yesterday at Boston Amazon Web Services Meetup Group -
http://www.meetup.com/The-Boston-Amazon-Web-Services-Meetup-Group/

Glad to see the good attendance and the group back up and running.  

Here is the linked in group:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=4651147&trk=anet_ug_hm

EMC acquires Tiburon Technologies - mainframe migration company

MartyTarr has done a great job growing Tiburon and it is now part of EMC along with Marty:
http://decisionpointint.com/decisionpoint-advises-tiburon-technologies-on-acquisition-by-emc-corporation/

Oracle Enterprise Manager on EC2

The situation:  Every time your reboot an AWS  server (EC2 instance - you may to do this to reattach an EBS volume that is in an LVM), - the Enterprise Manager in Oracle gets confused with the temporary host name (since the elastic IP is detached on restart). So when you assign the elastic IP back to the instance Enterprise Manager is referring to the temp hostname it got when the server rebooted.What is the recommended path to handling a server restart on elastic IPs without breaking OEM?

Solution:

I found these two items on web which may be useful:

1. https://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=3386069

2. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/cloud/oracle-aws-getting-started-twp-171089.pdf

Both mention using this process at instance boot time:

1. export ORACLE_HOSTNAME=`wget -q -O - http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/public-hostname`

2. export EMKEY_LOCATION=/u02/admin/$ORACLE_SID/

3. dbs emca -config dbcontrol db

Oracle helps Amazon save money on database backups

Very good article on moving from tape storage to AWS S3 for Oracle Database backups and archiving:

http://gigaom.com/cloud/how-oracle-yes-oracle-helped-amazon-suck-the-cost-out-of-database-backup/

White paper can be found here:

http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Amazon_Oracle_Backups.pdf

There are some very good ideas on how to secure you backup data both in transit and at rest.

You can find the Oracle Secure Back solution for AWS here:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/products/secure-backup/secure-backup-s3-484709.html

AWS EBS PIOPS volume creating tablespace

Creating you EBS volume and attaching it to your EC2 instance through the AWS console, CLI or APIs is just the first step in using this volume in your Oracle database.  If on Linux, you then need to format, create a mount point, and then mount your volume as follows:

1.mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdg

2. mkdir /mnt/oracle1000

3. mount /dev/sdg /mnt/oracle1000

(Remember to give permissions - chmod - to oracle user on your mount point)

 More information on mounting EBS volumes can be found here:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-using-volumes.html

To check if the device has been mounted properly, you can issue these commands:
-  df -l
-  mount

To insure that your EBS volumes get mounted at start up time, you can add the device mapping to the /etc/fstab file

Then the Oracle tablespace needs to be created.  This is done using the following command:

This is for creating a tablespace larger then the Oracle standard limits:
create bigfile tablespace datapiops1k
datafile '/mnt/oracle1000/bigfiledata.dbf'
size 600G;
 

Human Piston Bike Challenge Videos

The videos for the Boars Head Human Piston Bike challenge that took place in Hampton Beach, NH in Oct, 2012 can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/nimbusmeter/videos?view=0

Oracle AMI OS, database or weblogic version not available

Because there are so many permutations of Oracle databases, weblogic servers, and operating systems the Oracle AMIs (https://aws.amazon.com/amis?ami_provider_id=4&page=1&selection=ami_provider_id) can not possible have many of the configurations customers run.  Therefore, it is necessary to create a new AMI with the correct operating system and Oracle software:
We can always create a new one.  This is for a different Linux OS but shows the process (http://www.idevelopment.info/data/AWS/AWS_Tips/AWS_Management/AWS_10.shtml)

AWS Oracle Test Drive Labs

Want to see Oracle Secure Backup (OSB), Oracle DataGuard, Oracle APEX, Oracle Peoplesoft, Oracle Siebel, Oracle EBusiness Suite or other Oracle technologies and applications running on AWS in the public cloud.  Then go here:
http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/global-solution-providers/oracle/labs/

Oracle MySQL massive, highly clustered database on AWS

Oracle MySQL used by PayPal has 100 terabytes of user-related data.   The database is clustered world side:

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/317811,twitter-paypal-reveal-database-performance.aspx