This post is about the top facts about Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine from technical and business perspective.
1. On-premise licenses cannot be transferred to ExaCM.
2. The minimum commitment to both the ExaCM and OCM is 4 years and the minimum configuration is Eighth Rack.
3. The subscription price for Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Machine X6 Eighth Rack is $40,000 per month (= $2,500 X 16) and that includes all DB options/features, Exadata Software and OEM DB Packs.
4. Standalone products such as Oracle Secure Backup and Oracle GoldenGate are not included in the ExaCM subscription.
Only the database options (such as RAC, In-Memory, Partitioning, Active Data Guard, etc.), the database OEM packs and the Exadata storage server software are included.
5. ExaCM requires Oracle Cloud Machine to deploy Exadata Cloud Control Plane (separate subscription). OCM subscription requires similar minimum term commitment as ExaCM.
If a customer already has an OCM, that can be leveraged to deploy Exadata Control Plane at no extra cost. One OCM Model 288 can manage 6 ExaCM Full Racks (i.e. 24 ExaCM Quarter Racks or 12 ExaCM Half Racks).
Theoretically one OCM can support a much larger number of ExaCM full racks: about 50.
6. The 1/8th rack SKU is very similar to the on-premises 1/8th rack – i.e. minimum configuration of 16 OCPUs (cores), 240 GB RAM per database server, 144 TB raw storage (42 TB usable), 19.2TB of Flash.
Compared to the Quarter Rack, it ships with less RAM, disk storage and flash. Those will be field installed if the customer chooses to go for the 1/8th to Quarter Rack upgrade.
Note that this 1/8th rack enables customers to have an entry level configuration that is similar to what exists in Exadata Cloud Service.
7. Hourly Online Compute Bursting is supported with ExaCM. The commercial terms are the same as in Exadata Cloud Service – i.e. 25% premium over the Metered rate, calculated on an hourly basis.
Customers can scale up or down, dynamically. Bursting does not kick in automatically based on load. Bursting of OCPUs needs to be configured by customers as needed.
Once customer initiates bursting, the OCPU update is done dynamically without downtime. Customers will be billed later on the hours of bursting usage. Price: $8.401 per OCPU per hour.
8. If Cloud Control Plane is down, it doesn’t affect the availability of steady state runtime operations. However, cloud-based management (e.g. selfservice UI and REST API access) will be impacted.
9. Access: the Exadata Cloud Machine compute nodes are each configured with a Virtual Machine (VM). You have root privilege for the Exadata compute node VMs, so you can load and run additional software on the Exadata compute nodes.
However, you do not have administrative access to the Exadata infrastructure components, including the physical compute node hardware, network switches, power distribution units (PDUs), integrated lights-out management (ILOM) interfaces, or the Exadata Storage Servers, which are all administered by Oracle.
10. Patching and backups: you can produce a list of available patches using the exadbcpatchmulti command as follows
# /var/opt/oracle/exapatch/exadbcpatchmulti -list_patches
-sshkey=/home/opc/.ssh/id_rsa
-oh=hostname1:/u01/app/oracle/product/12.2.0.1/dbhome_1
When you create a database deployment on Exadata Cloud Machine, you must choose from the following automatic backup configuration options:
– Remote Storage Only: uses remote NFS storage to store periodic full (RMAN level 0) backups and daily incremental backups, with a seven day cycle between full backups and an overall retention period of thirty days.
– None: no automatic backups are configured. Automatic backups cannot be configured later if you select the None option when you create a database deployment.
Oracle Exadata Cloud Administrator and Implementation Certification Exam Available
1Z0-485 Oracle Exadata Database Machine 2014 Implementation Essentials
1Z0-027 Oracle Exadata X3 and X4 Administration
1Z0-338 Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Cloud Service 2017 Implementation Essentials
1Z0-070 Oracle Exadata X5 Administration
