Well, for every good experience, there's an equally compelling bad experience lurking somewhere I suspect. While I've known many successful deployments of NFS supporting Oracle DBs (apparently, you're one of them), I haven't been so lucky. I have seen many problems and have avoided it whenever possible in the last several years. So, my information may be a little dated and maybe I should take another look. I've never found a compelling argument FOR using NFS for Oracle and it's always seemed to be near equal in cost to the iSCSI solutions that I've had good luck with in the past few years. So, when there has been a decision to make, I've usually suggested using iSCSI instead of NFS and that's worked well in my experiences. So, I wouldn't refuse to work on a system using NFS, it would just be my 2nd choice when there are other options (and there usually are). Dan ----- Original Message ---- From: D'Hooge Freek <Freek.D'Hooge@xxxxxxxxx> To: "dannorris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <dannorris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>; "krish.hariharan@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <krish.hariharan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>; "Jon.Crisler@xxxxxxx" <Jon.Crisler@xxxxxxx> Cc: Oracle-L Freelists <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 4:08:39 PM Subject: RE: NFS on a 10g RAC cluster Dan, If I understood Jon's original question correctly, he does not want to place his datafiles on nfs, but instead setup an nfs server on one of the rac nodes and he wanted to know if there was a way to let the nfs server failover from one rac node to the other. BTW, Is there any particular reason why you are not a fan of putting Oracle databases on NFS? I must say I have rather good experiences with it. regards, Freek D'Hooge Uptime Oracle Database Administrator e-mail: freek.dhooge@xxxxxxxxx tel. +32 (0)3 451 23 82 http://www.uptime.be disclaimer From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Dan Norris [dannorris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: 10 December 2007 22:59 To: krish.hariharan@xxxxxxxxxxxx; Jon.Crisler@xxxxxxx Cc: Oracle-L Freelists Subject: Re: NFS on a 10g RAC cluster I'm not a fan of putting Oracle DBs on NFS. Furthermore, as this list shows: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/clustering/certify/tech_generic_unix_new.html, only a relatively small handful of specialized NFS appliances/software are supported for RAC. That is, you can't take the typical UNIX NFS server implementation and use it to run RAC in a supported way. If you don't care about support and just want to build a sandbox, it may work fine--I've used OpenFiler for sandboxes and it worked well for my functional (not load) testing. Dan ----- Original Message ---- From: "krish.hariharan@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <krish.hariharan@xxxxxxxxxxxx> To: Jon.Crisler@xxxxxxx Cc: Oracle-L Freelists <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 1:37:46 PM Subject: Re: NFS on a 10g RAC cluster Jon, From discussions with a Unix architect, I understood that read-write nfs has some holes that our security teams did not like. We however use read only nfs routinely in many environments. The issues were: 1. Security did not like us using nfs, especially read-write 2. In our Solaris environments, in some older OS releases, stale nfs mounts were problematic. A question though: Is there a reason why you wouldn't have the nfs mounts on all nodes of the RAC and perhaps control access to that mount point through, say the services framework as opposed to failing the mount point to different nodes? -Krish -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l