RE: ocfs2/oracleasm on Red Hat 4

  • From: "Matthew Zito" <mzito@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "QuijadaReina, Julio C" <QuijadJC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Guillermo Alan Bort" <cicciuxdba@xxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 12:43:29 -0400

For sure, both Oracle and Red Hat are encouraging people to go to RHEL5.  
However, they can encourage all they like, it's still technically a supported 
OS by both organizations, so they don't have a lot of choice if you press the 
issue.

If you're looking at upgrading to RHEL5, I guess my question would be - why are 
you looking at upgrading the kernel version?  If it's just as a best practice, 
I'd discourage you from doing so.  If it's for a specific bug, then you may not 
have any options.

But RHEL4->5 has a number of changes in a number of areas, notably the iSCSI 
stack, the required kernel parameters for Oracle, a different kernel scheduler 
model, etc.  I'd be very leery of upgrading between major RHELs if possible.

The last option is that you could make your own ASMlib and OCFS2 modules 
compiled against the updated red hat kernel - probably a shorter turnaround 
time vs. oracle and you don't have to deal with them.  However, does put you in 
the business of rolling your own software, which some folks are quite resistant 
to.

Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: QuijadaReina, Julio C [mailto:QuijadJC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009 12:36 PM
To: Matthew Zito; Guillermo Alan Bort
Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: ocfs2/oracleasm on Red Hat 4

Matt, I appreciate the thoughts about the benefits of using ASMlib. I am kind 
of debating whether to open an SR or upgrade my systems to RHEL5. I think 
Oracle is hinting toward having people do that - in my opinion.

Julio
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Zito [mailto:mzito@xxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009 11:00 AM
To: QuijadaReina, Julio C; Guillermo Alan Bort
Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: ocfs2/oracleasm on Red Hat 4

You don't technically *need* ASMlib for ASM environments, but it has some 
definite advantages:

- guaranteed consistent disk naming across multiple nodes
- no need to worry about a SAN admin changing something that screws up your 
disk ordering
- Automatically setting permissions for the disk devices

As far as the available version, you could try opening an SR with Oracle and 
asking them to compile the drivers for you - I had to do that once for a 
customer who had to run a custom RHEL kernel due to a driver bug that was 
discovered.

Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of QuijadaReina, Julio C
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009 8:36 AM
To: Guillermo Alan Bort
Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: ocfs2/oracleasm on Red Hat 4

Thanks Alan,
What you say is interesting. We are a RAC shop and I have always used oracleasm 
tools to create/delete ASM disks for SAN shared storage before or after I use 
them for an ASM instance. Maybe it's just my ignorance, but is there another 
way to do that without oracleasm? 

I did check the links and the download files go as far as kernel 2.6.9-78.0.22. 
The kernel I was going to upgrade to was 2.6.9-89 but didn't see that one on 
the list. I will test this on a test RAC to see if the current ocfs2/o2cb level 
allows me to mount the crs disks after upgrading to a newer OS kernel.

Thanks,
Julio Quijada


From: alanbort@xxxxxxxxx [mailto:alanbort@xxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Guillermo 
Alan Bort
Sent: Tuesday, May 26, 2009 11:51 PM
To: QuijadaReina, Julio C
Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: ocfs2/oracleasm on Red Hat 4

oracleasm is not needed for RH4U1 and up, you simply install the RDBMS, patch 
to whaterver patchset you want, fire up dbca and create the ASM instance. Works 
as well for RAC. 

Also, check http://oss.oracle.com/osswiki/OCFS2/NewFeaturesList which has the 
documentation for OCFS2. and http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/files/ for 
the download files. See that there are files for both RH4 and RH5.

hth
Alan Bort
Oracle Certified Professional

On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 1:19 PM, QuijadaReina, Julio C 
<QuijadJC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello All,

I was doing some server updates and noticed that ocfs2 and oracleasm lib are 
not available for Linux kernels higher than 2.6.9-78.0.22. Does this imply that 
for newer kernel versions the user must compile them? or maybe the newer 
kernels don't need these apps to be updated? Anybody seen this out there?

Thanks,
Julio Quijada
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