OCI FSS Limitations

20 th December 2022 - Oracle has provided the File storage service for use as a managed Shared storage within OCI. This i snow the preferred Storage to be used with Oracle E- business suite on OCI as is evidenced in Oracle Support Note

"Sharing the Application Tier File System in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 or 12.1.3 Using the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure File Storage Service (Doc ID 2794300.1)"

This already talk about some limitations of the system for example "

The APPLLDM environment variable is referenced by AutoConfig and used to control the placement of concurrent processing logs. The placement of these files can have performance implications. APPLLDM should be set to a value otherthan single, so that there are multiple log and output directories versus one large directory. "

So like many other shared filesystems having directories with many files in them is a no-no for good performance. EBS has provided workarounds for this. But if you are using this as a general purpose filesystem you need to be aware of this and ensure that no individual directory holds too many files.

There is another restriction that we came across which under normal circumstances you might overlook without a second thought. We had a customer who has a large number of machines that share a single mount point. For security reasons we needed to encrypt our connection between the FSS storage and these production machines. There is an RPM that can be installed on Linux servers to enable TLS 1.2 security and create a TLS tunnel to the FSS mount point. oci-fss-utils-*.rpm has to be installed. But with this there is a limitation that at the most 64 hosts can mount the target share. For architectural reasons the setup of our customer had more hosts than this magic number. We are looking into options to see if this can be increased but as of now we have not found anything.