Founded on a service-oriented architecture, Oracle's Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 8 software allows businesses to build scalable standards-based applications that can attract new business and increase customer loyalty. As companies deliver a comprehensive and rich customer experience through Siebel CRM 8 applications, user demand often scales rapidly, forcing datacenters to expand system resources quickly to meet increasing load. Typically datacenter resources are scaled horizontally (with more servers added at each tier), vertically (by adding more powerful servers), or both. As servers are added at Siebel Web, Gateway, Application, and Database tiers, a frequent result is server sprawl. Over time, the datacenter can suffer from negative consequences - greater complexity, poor utilization, increased maintenance fees, and skyrocketing power and cooling costs.

Consolidating tiers is one approach that can help to contain server sprawl and reduce costs. Recognizing the need to grow efficiently while scaling Siebel CRM 8 capabilities, Sun created a proof-of-concept solution that consolidates Web, Gateway, Application, and Database tiers on a single Sun SPARC Enterprise® T5440 server, reducing the number of physical machines needed to effectively deploy applications. As shown in a testing exercise using a well-known Siebel CRM 8 workload, the solution scales well on a single server as the number of users increases, even with workloads up to 14,000 users.

This article describes the proof-of-concept solution and the scalability testing performed. It covers these topics:

• A Solution for Consolidating Siebel CRM 8 Tiers
• Workload Description and Test Environment
• Performance and Scalability Results with Solaris Containers
• Performance and Scalability Results with Sun Logical Domains (LDoms)
• Best Practices and Sizing Recommendations
• High Availability via Solaris Cluster Software

This article assumes that the reader has a basic understanding of Oracle Siebel CRM 8 applications. It is also assumes that the reader has some basic familiarity with testing methodology.