Planning an Oracle Fusion Middleware Cluster

Oracle Health Insurance are executed on Oracle Fusion Middleware (or Oracle WebLogic server), typically in a clustered setup. This chapter provides guidelines and considerations for planning the cluster topology.

Although the processing capacity of the system can always be adjusted at a later stage, Oracle recommends to plan production configurations carefully and test these thoroughly before executing Oracle Health Insurance in a production environment.

Planning CPU Utilization

Oracle Health Insurance are typically CPU bound applications and proper CPU utilization is important for their performance or throughput. The Oracle WebLogic documentation (section "WebLogic Server Instances on Multi-CPU machines") states that "In most cases, WebLogic Server clusters scale best when deployed with one WebLogic Server instance for every two CPUs." In performance tests, it was determined that the best processing throughput is indeed achieved with a JVM instance for every two CPUs or every four CPU cores (modern systems are mostly equipped with quad-core CPUs if not better).

Example: for a server machine that is equipped with two quad-core CPUs and 32GB of memory start with two Managed Server instances for executing an Oracle Health Insurance application.

Determining the number of Processing Threads

Oracle Health Insurance make use of Work Managers in order to control the amount of processing threads. The size of the thread pool can be influenced through the Work Manager configuration that is accessible via the WebLogic Console. As a rule of thumb, the following recommendations may be used as a starting point:

  • For WebLogic Managed Server instances that service User Interface and Web Service requests and that process tasks or activities, the recommended value of the Maximum Threads Constraint for the Core Work Manager is equal to the number of CPU cores that is available to the managed server.

  • For specialized Managed Server instances that only process tasks or activities (i.e. no User Interface and Web Service requests are directed to it) the recommended value of the Maximum Threads Constraint for the Core Work Manager is equal to the number of CPU cores that is available to the managed server times two.

Verify the throughput: run performance tests

Before any Oracle Health Insurance application is executed in a production environment, make sure that it is capable of handling the required throughput by testing the system in a production-like configuration, that is with:

  • Production hardware or production-like hardware.

  • Production data, including the configuration data (like Dynamic Fields and Dynamic Logic) and real-life sets of Members and Providers.

  • The workload that a production system should be able to handle.

  • A representative web services load.

  • The expected number of concurrent users that the system must be able to service.