Should I Implement a Shared Appl Top? And if so How?

Print this post

1:- Is it recommended to implement a shared APPL_TOP?

Both single APPL_TOP and shared APPL_TOP are supported. Full details of the requirement can be found in

Note.233428.1 Sharing the Application Tier File System in Oracle Applications Release 11i
Note.384248.1 Sharing The Application Tier File System in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12

There is no official Oracle support document that would recommend a shared APPL_TOP over a normal APPL_TOP. The DBA and the business need to decide if the costs and factors involved in implementing a shared file system, outweigh the benefits (reduced patching time etc)

However there is a very good blog article by the Oracle E-Business suite integrations team that explains the choices and benefits of using a shared APPL_TOP.

Choosing a Shared File System for Oracle E-Business Suite
http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2009/07/choosing_an_ebs_shared_file_system.html

There is also some good information in

Reducing Patching Downtimes via Shared Apps File Systems
http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2007/05/reducing_patching_downtimes_vi.html

2:- What are the requirements from the Backend?

This is an area that Oracle support is unable to help you with, other than tell you that you need to have a storage system that can mount drives to multiple servers. Full detail of Oracle's position on this can be found in

Choosing a Shared File System for Oracle E-Business Suite
http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2009/07/choosing_an_ebs_shared_file_system.html

The issue generally come down to how much money you have for the storage system. NFS for example is very cheap but the NFS mount can be classed as a single point of failure (e.g. NFS mount goes down, all E-business suite middle tiers go down).