A pictorial representation of the environment used in this reference environment is shown in Figure 2.1, “Reference Architecture Overview”

Figure 2.1. Reference Architecture Overview

The network topology in this reference environment consists of two public switches, and two iSCSI storage switches. Public Switch A and Public Switch B, with a link aggregation that connect them together creating a single logical switch. Ethernet device em1 on the server connects to Public Switch A, while Ethernet device em2 on the server connects to Public Switch B. Ethernet devices em1 and em2 are bonded together as a bond device, bond0, providing high availability for the public network traffic. Figure 2.2, “Network Bonding” shows the pictorial representation of the two public switches connecting to the server and the Ethernet bonding of device em1 and em2 as part of the bond0 device. iSCSI Switch A and iSCSI Switch B also use a link aggregation that connects them together creating a single logical switch. Ethernet device em3 on the server connects to iSCSI Switch A and em4 on the server connects to iSCSI Switch B. It is recommended that em3 and em4 be 10GB Network cards for better performance when accessing the storage. Figure 2.3, “iSCSI Switch Connectivity” shows a pictorial representation of the connectivity of the Ethernet devices to the iSCSI switches.

Figure 2.2. Network Bonding

Figure 2.3. iSCSI Switch Connectivity

The following are the hardware requirements to properly install Oracle Database 12c Release 2 on a x86_64 system:

Table 2.1, “Server Details” specifies the hardware for the server within this reference environment. This hardware meets the minimum requirements for properly installing Oracle Database 12c Release 2 on a x86_64 system.

Table 2.2, “Switch Details” specifies the switches within this reference environment.

Table 2.3, “Storage Details” specifies the storage within this reference environment.

The following is the disk space requirements for properly installing Oracle Database 12c Release 2 software for this reference environment.

Table 2.5, “File System Layout” specifies the file system layout for the server used in this reference environment. The layout ensures the disk space requirements to properly install the Oracle Grid Infrastructure and Oracle Database software for Oracle Database 12c Release 2

While the size of the Oracle data files varies for each solution, the following are the Oracle data file sizes for this reference environment.

Swap space is determined by the amount of RAM found within the system. The following table displays the swap space recommendation. This reference environment allocates 16 GB of RAM for swap space.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 introduces the dynamic firewall daemon, firewalld. firewalld provides a dynamically managed firewall with support for network/firewall zones to define the trust level of network connections or interfaces¹. firewalld is the default firewall service in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, however, iptables service is still available. It is important to note that with the iptables service, every single change means flushing all the old rules and reading all of the new rules from the /etc/sysconfig/iptables while the firewalld there is no re-creating of all the rules; only the differences are applied. Consequently, firewalld can change the setting during runtime without existing connections being lost². For the purposes of this reference architecture, firewalld is used and is the preferred method of implementing firewall rules. This section focuses on providing the details required to run firewall-cmd successfully for an Oracle Database environment. Table 2.8, “Firewall Settings” lists the enabled ports in this reference environment.

1: Linux man pages - man (1) firewalld

2: 4.5.3 Comparison of firewalld to system-config-firewalld and iptables

Starting with Oracle 11g Release 2 version 11.2.0.3, SELinux is supported for Oracle database environments. The system in this reference environment runs with SELinux enabled and set to ENFORCING mode.