It's been mentioned and proved several times that Sun/Oracle's T-series hardware is the best fit to deploy and run Siebel CRM. Feel free to browse through the list of Siebel benchmarks that Sun published in the past on T-series:

        2004-2010 : A Look Back at Sun Published Oracle Benchmarks

Oracle Corporation announced the availability of SPARC T3 servers in Oracle OpenWorld 2010, and sure enough there is a Siebel CRM benchmark on SPARC T3-1 server to support the server launch event. Check the following web page for high level details of the benchmark.

        SPARC T3-1 Server Posts a High Score on New Siebel CRM 8.1.1 Benchmark

I intend to provide the missing pieces of information in this blog post.

First of all, it is not a "Platform Sizing and Performance Program" (PSPP) benchmark. Siebel 8.1.1 was used to run the benchmark, and there is no Siebel PSPP benchmark kit available as of today for v8.1.1. Hence the test results from this benchmark exercise are not directly comparable to the Siebel 8.0 PSPP benchmark results.

Workload

The benchmark workload consists of a mix of Siebel Financial Services Call Center and Siebel Web Services / EAI transactions. The FINS Call Center transactions create a bunch of Opportunities, Quotes and Orders, where as the Web Services / EAI transactions submit new Service Requests (SR), search for and update existing SRs. The transaction mix is 40% FINS Call Center transactions and 60% Web Services / EAI transactions.

Software Versions

• Siebel CRM 8.1.1
• Oracle RDBMS 11g R2 (11.2.0.1), 64-bit
• iPlanet Web Server 7.0 Update 8, 32-bit
• Solaris 10 09/10 in the application-tier and
• Solaris 10 10/09 in the web- and database-tiers

Hardware Configuration

• Application Server : 1 x SPARC T3-1 Server (2 RU system)
  • One socket 16-Core 1.65 GHz SPARC T3 processor, 128 hardware threads, 6 MB L2 Cache, 64 GB RAM
• Web Server + Database Server : 1 x Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 Server (2 RU system)
  • Two socket 16-Core 1.165 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors, 128 hardware threads, 4 MB L2 Cache, 64 GB RAM

Virtualization Technology

iPlanet Web Server and the Oracle 11g Database Server were configured on a single Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 Server. Those software layers were isolated from each other with the help of Oracle Solaris Containers virtualization technology. Resource allocations are shown below.

Tier	#vCPU	Memory (GB)
Database	96	48
Web	32	16

Test Results

#vUsers	Avg Trx Resp Time (sec)		Business Trx Throughput/HR		Avg CPU Utilization (%)			Avg Memory Footprint (GB)
	FINS	EAI	FINS	EAI	App	DB	Web	App	DB + Web
13,000	0.43	0.2	48,409	116,449	58	42	37	52	35

Why stop at 13K users?

Notice that the average CPU utilization on the application server node (SPARC T3-1) is only ~58%. The application server node has room to accommodate more online vusers - however, there is not enough free memory left on the server to scale beyond 13,000 concurrent users. That is the main reason to stop at 13,000 user count in this benchmark.

Siebel Best Practices

Check the following presentation:

        Siebel on Oracle Solaris : Best Practices, Tuning Tips

Acknowledgments

Credit to all our peers at Oracle Corporation who helped us with the hardware, workload, verification and validation etc., in a timely manner. Also Jenny deserves special credit for spending enormous amount of time running the benchmark with patience.

Original blog post URL:
http://blogs.sun.com/mandalika/entry/sparc_t3_reiterates_siebel_s