Re: ZFS or UFS? Solaris 11 or better stay with Solaris 10?
- From: przemolicc@xxxxxxxxx
- To: De DBA <dedba@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:41:24 +0200
Hi Tony,
- regarding UFS vs ZFS. The best thing is to do any (!) sort of tests. But if
you really cannot do This is really difficult question since:
- zfs is brand new filesystem which will be improved more and more. UFS
will not be improved.
- but does it matter for you if you will keep this system for
years without change ?
- zfs has much more features which are unknown for UFS (and never will
be)
- but do you really need them ?
- if you insist on using ZFS for Oracle read the following URL:
http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_for_Databases#Oracle_Considerations
- there are a lot of knowledge (in terms of people experience) in the
internet about using UFS + Oracle
- if you can do any sort of tests (ZFS vs UFS):
- you can do it on both ZFS and UFS using:
- Orion (Oracle tool to test storage performance)
- of course don't relay on just one tool and
its results
- Oracle 11 IO calibration (new feature)
and just compare the results
- a couple of URLs:
- https://blogs.oracle.com/roch/entry/zfs_and_directio
- regarding Solaris 10 vs 11
- Solaris 11 has many new features. You can read WPs about What's new,
etc. It's worth reading.
- but do you need them for typical OLTP (DSS ?) environment ?
- Solaris 10 is stable and predictable
- but does it matter for you ? Maybe you like new environments
? New features ?
- having Solaris 10 does not mean that you cannot upgrade to
Solaris 11 in the future. Live Upgrade is a feature which helps you in this
area.
- if you happen to have a bug in Solaris 11 Oracle support is not known
to be the best on this planet regarding fixing new bugs ...
- regarding SAN
- if you have typical hardware array I would not mirror at the
filesystem level - don't complicate this.
- quite old but anyway ...
http://storagemojo.com/2007/04/23/new-zfs-performance-numbers/
Best regards
Przemyslaw Bak (przemol)
--
http://przemol.blogspot.com/
On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 11:34:25PM +1000, De DBA wrote:
> 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
>
> --
> //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
>
--
//www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
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