By the way, there is reference to a comparison made by a “Roby Sherman” and many sites have links to a page but it seems the report was abducted by -someone- from Internet, do you know something about it ?

In response to the /3gb in windows you can check out this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx

Local support for Oracle sent me this link, please review it and tell me if you can make any conclusion from those results:
http://www.oracle.com/apps_benchmark/html/results.html

Thank you again.

My client decided that the Linux platform was the way forward for it’s new applications. So that decision was already made for me, as was the version of Linux – Red-Hat. (As it is supported by Oracle).

My view on the whole thing, for what it is worth is that Oracle themselves are now migration, (From SUn/Solaris) to a DEll/Linux platform, with F5/BigIP Loadbalancing. You can checkout the Oracle whitepapers for their internal networks. To me that speaks volumes…!

Dave

There’s plenty of press about Linux versus Windows and most of it conflicting. So you can always find an article to support one over the other. I think the argument is relatively simple. Both Windows and Linux offer a potentially low cost computing platform, so the choice is more readily driven by:

1) If you come from a Unix background, then migrating to Linux is no big deal and I would suggest you stick to what you pretty much know and love.

2) If you come from a non Unix background (especially if it’s mainly a Windows background) then the migration to Unix can be very costly in training and skills conversion.

For those Unix/Linux lovers/Windows haters out there, here is some factual information about Oracle on Windows.

There can be memory issues running Oracle on the 32bit versions of Windows. The main problem is that Oracle coded all of the database related processes to run within a single ORACLE.EXE executable, rather than keeping the processes as separate executables/threads as they do on other operating systems. All 32bit operating systems have a fundamental 4Gb memory limit, unless they invoke some kind of extended memory handling.

Windows Server Standard editions (NT, 2000 and 2003 varieties) limit any single process to being able to address only 2Gb of memory, even though upto 4Gb of physical memory may be installed – the other 2Gb is reserved for operating system use. If you install the Enterprise Editions (or above) of Windows Server, you can use the 4GT (4Gb Tuning – use /3GB in BOOT.INI) feature to allow any executable to address up to 3Gb of memory. Also, with Windows 2000/2003 Server Enterprise Editions (and above) Oracle can address memory above 4Gb for database read buffers (check the /PAE setting at microsoft.com and AWE on Oracle MetaLink). We are currently implementing new server hardware running Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition with 12Gb of memory. So it can be done if you know what you are doing.

If you use 64 Bit versions of Windows, then you can have (pretty much!) as much memory as you like/can afford. At the moment this is limited to Itanium processors, but the latest generation Intel processors with 64bit extensions (look for EMT) and AMD 64 bit processors will be properly supported with the x86 64bit version of Windows Server due in 2005.

As for overall performance and reliability of Windows? Well, as an Oracle reference site we have hosted visits from many large corporates with large, Unix based installs. All of them were envious of both the performance of our Oracle Apps and the reliability. Our system is available 24 x 7 and is rarely shutdown, usually for applying Oracle patches!

Having said all of this, Oracle do indeed develop on and champion Linux as a platform of choice. There are compromises on Windows, especially with the Oracle EBusiness Suite. So back to my original statement – if you already have Unix skills, why would you not choose Linux – it’s your obvious “low cost” solution and you really shouldn’t lose any sleep over whether you could have saved a little bit more by going Windows.

Existing system supports (so they say) 80+ users using an e450,(3cpu,3g RAM) AND A PAIR OF WINTEL2K APPS SERVERS one for Production and one for test.

The new system is initially a 9iASr1 (due to 11i certification restrictions), with plans to migrate over to 9iASr4(10g) early in the new year, as part of the early adopter program. Running a full DELL platform, with EMC-SAN (5Tb) and f5/BigIP load-balancing. (21 servers in total).

Currently in the build-out phase, expect to have the 11i test/dev environment environment (Fi+CRM) before XMAS.

All running smoothly thus far…

Dave

We also run a significant W2K SQL*Server environment for another application. Downtime on that system far exceeds the downtime on Linux. My administrators like it better!