RE: Oracle 11g CRS, RAC and ASM on Solaris

  • From: "Lawie, Duncan" <duncan.lawie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "Dan Norris" <dannorris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:58:49 +0100

Rather than worrying about the alternatives to ASM, which I know exist
...
 
How do you choose to present a disk to ASM?  
How does your choice handle multipathing? 
What about the issue of different nodes potentially having different
paths?  Finn mentioned this, but on non-RAC (at least), moving to a
different path doesn't upset ASM too much
http://frits.homelinux.com/wordpress/?p=30
 
 

________________________________

From: Dan Norris [mailto:dannorris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: 28 April 2008 18:54
To: Mark.Bobak@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: richard.goulet@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; Best, David; Lawie, Duncan;
oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Oracle 11g CRS, RAC and ASM on Solaris


Hold on--RAW was never a requirement, but it has always been an option.
In the early days (circa OPS), there weren't many alternatives (except
on VMS and Tru64/Digital UNIX), so RAW was more common back then. 

ASM isn't a requirement either (for any version), except when using RAC
with Standard Edition as Freek pointed out. For that configuration ASM
is a license restriction, but it isn't a technical limitation. Note that
for RAC with Standard Edition, you also must use *only* Oracle
Clusterware--no 3rd party clusterware allowed. 

For storage, I recommend ASM when using 10g R2 or higher. However,
you'll find that even when using ASM, you'll still need to support
non-ASM files like the OCR and Voting Disks for Clusterware. They can't
go in ASM (chicken and egg problem), so you have to resort to using
either RAW devices for them or place them on a supported cluster
filesystem. For some customers (especially on platforms that don't have
OCFS for free, like Solaris), the common choice is to use RAW for these
files since a CFS is expensive and often requires some other clusterware
(thereby throwing another vendor/software in the already-complex
environment). 

I would echo Dick's recommendation to use only Oracle Clusterware
(avoiding additional 3rd party clusterware) which was what you already
said was proposed in your environment. I would use ASM for database
storage. As for how you manage non-shared storage, VxFS over VxVM is a
fine and common solution, especially on Solaris. As I mentioned, you'll
need to address how/where to store the OCR and voting disks--for your
environment, I'd suggest using RAW.

Dan

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