Re: ASM to replace vxvm/vxfs;

  • From: "Jason Arneil" <Jason@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: zhuchao@xxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:41:00 +0000

Hello,

oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 19/12/2007 13:39:11:

> thanks Krish, your points are very helpful, especially on point 1/2.
> 
> Overall are people happy with ASM? Performance wise, and management 
> overhead (compared to OS volume manager/filesystem )? 
> stable(whether lots of bugs, or some minor bug with patch 
> avalible/easy workaround)?
> 

Somewhat like yourself (though smaller data volumes), we moved from 
running Veritas (vxvm/vxfs) to using ASM. We too use EMC powerpath for 
multipathing and this has proved reliable. In our case, we are using RAC 
so needed some form of cluster aware storage. We did this migration some 
18 months ago, and have been running on 10.2.0.2 and now 10.2.0.3. The 
most worrying thing for us was how reliable ASM was going to be, as it was 
(and to some extent still is) fairly new technology. We have not 
encountered any stability issues with it so far. The performance has not 
been an issue, but then should you not get near raw performance as opposed 
to a cooked filesystem?

We run external redundancy - for us why pay EMC $$$ and not use the 
storage arrays capabilities. All issues I've heard of, mostly via UKOUG 
events have been related to using ASM mirroring and rebalancing on disk 
failure/adding new drives. If you get the latest and greatest patchset 
you'll probably be fine, I'm sure this is not the case with you (we are 
all on 10.2 now, right?), but I personally would not have touched ASM in 
the early 10.1 patchsets. 

For me, I was keen to move away from the additional overhead of having to 
understand/debug veritas issues, taking one supplier out of the loop 
seemed a sensible strategy and so far this has proved to be the case. 
Though, if you are using VCS for failover, then this may not have a direct 
read across for you.

regards,

jason.

====
Dr. Jason F. Arneil
DBA
Nominet UK
http://jarneil.wordpress.com
====

> 
> -Krish
> 
> 

> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Regards
> Zhu Chao
> www.cnoug.org
--
//www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l


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