Re: Oracle RAC on Win vs. Oracle on Linux

  • From: Martin Bach <development@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: robertgfreeman@xxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:30:34 +0000

Hi Robert,

On 02/22/2010 11:05 PM, Robert Freeman wrote:
> Anyone want to jump in on their preferred platform for RAC?

Adding my opinion to the thread. I have supported 6 2 node 10.2.0.2 RAC
SE clusters on Windows a few years ago, and here's what I didn't like (I
agree that some of these are linked to my lack of understanding of
Windows internals):

- Windows is much more of a black box than Linux IMO. I needed to
download tools from sysinternals to understand what's happening under
the bonnet
- It's not as straight forward to kill Oracle processes on the OS level.
Oracle is implemented as one multithreaded binary on Windows
- The implementation I inherited used Microsoft's clustering software
which doesn't like RAC at all. We had serious problems with ASM volumes.
I agree that this isn't a Windows fault but it bugged us a lot
- The initial installation of Clusterware was done with a domain
account. After the AD admins migrated users to a different domain and
switched off the old AD PDCs the cluster wouldn't start. Lesson learned:
install CRS and RDBMS as local administrator. Always
- I had big problems performing cluster maintenance: a hardware crash
forced us to remove the 2nd node from one of the clusters and then I
couldn't add in the new node. If memory serves me right then it had to
do with the passwordless access to the remote registry which didn't work
despite my and Oracle Support's best efforts; OUI addnode.bat failed
repeatedly and we had to rebuild the whole cluster with considerable
downtime
- you can't get one off patches for Windows (regardless of RAC or single
instance)

As you may have guessed I am not a Windows person, and don't want to
become one-I feel much more comfortable with OSs that allow you to see
what's happening without having to add 50 or so odd counters to a MMC
snap in which is absolutely rubbish in conveying the relevant
information in shiny colored dashboards. Can you imaging dtrace for
Windows?

Martin

-- 
Martin Bach
OCM 10g
http://martincarstenbach.wordpress.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/martincarstenbach
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