RE: ZFS or UFS? Solaris 11 or better stay with Solaris 10?
- From: "Mark W. Farnham" <mwf@xxxxxxxx>
- To: <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2012 06:20:20 -0400
Of course while I was typing this the response from Frits came through. At
least we didn't disagree about anything....
-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Mark W. Farnham
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 6:16 AM
To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: ZFS or UFS? Solaris 11 or better stay with Solaris 10?
G'day - I'm just curious why there is no question about using ASM with
external redundancy, putting the bulk of your storage requirement into a
format that is the path forward for Oracle while letting the SAN box take
the load on the stuff it is good at, opening the possibility of moving to
RAC without reloading everything, and making the total contents size in file
systems on UFS or ZFS small enough that moving file systems or changing your
mind is no big whoop.
Along with the other poster to this thread, I'd suggest testing and
especially testing that a proposed configuration provides the i/o throughput
you require with a margin for growth.
Regards,
mwf
-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of De DBA
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 9:34 AM
To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: ZFS or UFS? Solaris 11 or better stay with Solaris 10?
G'day,
I'm involved in a project to migrate a 4TB database from HP/UX 11 and Oracle
9i to a brand-new Sun M5000 server with Oracle 11.2.0.3. This database
suffers insert transactions in the order of 70 tx/sec. The daily redo
production is in the order of 45GB. Management reports are also run with
great vigour (i.e. large volumes of disk read IOPS). Two further tiny
instances (5-7GB each) also live in the same environment.
The original plan was to install Solaris 10 on the new server and create a
big ZFS pool on the san, as proposed by Oracle Sales. However, doubts have
arisen as to the performance of ZFS with Oracle databases, and we now lean
towards using UFS for the database files. All discussions and white papers
that I have been able to find on the subject stress to closely follow the
upgrade path, as ZFS is continuously being improved still. Some blogs give
pointers on how to make ZFS perform "almost the same as UFS", which sounds
to me as a lot of extra effort for no gain. I struggle to find any
validation for choosing ZFS over UFS.
Today, the boss was told by a relation who used to work for Sun that that
relation would no longer install boxes with UFS. He would also enable direct
IO instead of totally relying on ZFS. The SAN disks should according to this
relation be presented as raw disks, rather than striped-and-mirrored LUNs,
to be RAIDed in ZFS. Apparently there are desirable features in ZFS that
make this worthwhile. It should be noted that the SAN is (almost) completely
dedicated to this one database machine and has block copy capabilities,
built-in raid, etc.
To me it seems a bit back-to-front to disable the SAN functionality,
effectively turning it into an expensive external disk array, and at the
same time shifting all the work that the SAN would have done to the database
machine CPU where it competes for resources with the Oracle instances. What
advantages, if any, exist that make using ZFS in this way is preferable over
UFS? Do you have any experience with it?
The Solaris version was bought before Oracle certified 11.2.0.3 on Solaris
11, but now it seems silly not to upgrade Solaris before this system goes
life. It will quite possibly not be able to be upgraded any time soon,
possibly not until after Oracle 14x is released.. ;) The same relation
however also insisted that "there are certification issues with Solaris 11"
and he would never install Oracle 11g database on Solaris 11. However, MOS
clearly shows that 11.2.0.3 is fully certified on Solaris 11. Do you happen
to know what issues could exist that pre-empt the use of Solaris 11, even if
that might mean that the client will be on Solaris 10 for the next decade?
I would like to hear about your experiences and thoughts.
Cheers,
Tony
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