Very Computer

Right now I've got some 3.5 Veritas Clusters running Oracle8
that are due for an upgrade.

I'm playing around with the idea of getting rid of all of
our Veritas software and replacing it with Sun software
(since cluster is now free).

So it would be:

Solaris 10 (01/06 HW release, latest patches)
Sun Volume Manager
MPXIO
QFS
Sun Cluster 3.1

I've used Veritas for so long now & am weary of mixing it in
with Sun Cluster.  Ideally - I'd like to just go with one vendor
for my clustering.

Is MPXIO comparable to DMP?  Are people actually running Sun volume
manager under production Oracle DB's?  I've used SVM for mirroring
boot drives on web servers and app servers but never in the database
tier.

I've read that QFS can do the volume management all on it's own -
is that what people are typically using with Sun Clusters?

I'm reading the FAQs and white papers right now but would love to
hear from some people with real world experience with the stuff.

-Sanjay

OK.

Quote:>Is MPXIO comparable to DMP?  

Yes.

Quote:>Are people actually running Sun volume
>manager under production Oracle DB's?  I've used SVM for mirroring
>boot drives on web servers and app servers but never in the database
>tier.

Yes. It is in use by customers. If you want to go to QFS as a cluster
backend file system, it is only supported with SVM and not Veritas.

Quote:>I've read that QFS can do the volume management all on it's own -
>is that what people are typically using with Sun Clusters?

Since QFS cannot do mirroring it is typically used on top of
SVM mirrored metadevices.

Quote:>I'm reading the FAQs and white papers right now but would love to
>hear from some people with real world experience with the stuff.

If you plan to use Oracle RAC you need the special Oracle RAC SVM Edition.
This has now been replaced/renamed by/to Sun Cluster Advanced Edition
for Oracle RAC. (internally known as OBAN).

:)

Regards
Fredrik

--
Fredrik Lundholm  

I noticed they had not certified 10g on their website yet.

Is the general consensus now that if you run Sun Cluster you go with Sun
for VM/MpXIO & QFS?

Or do a lot of people still mix and match w/Veritas.

-Sanjay

I use SVM+SC+Oracle for some years - works perfect.

--
                                                Robert Milkowski

                                                http://milek.blogspot.com

We currently are running two Sun Clusters, one version 3.0 with Oracle
OPS on Solaris 8 and a second with Cluster 3.1 and Oracle RAC on
Solaris 9. Both clusters use Veritas VM for storage management but use
the MPxIO drivers for multipathing.

Veritas used to make the argument that the DMP multipath driver offered
better load balancing. From what I have read on MPxIO (been out of
Solaris world for a while), round-robin is the default (only??) load
balancing model. Truthfully, not sure if it makes much difference in
95% of the cases.

If using OPS/RAC, you need your DBAs to bring down Oracle instances for
node or cluster shutdown. Instance control not included as part of a
package/resource group in this configuration. Just means more
coordination and people involved during restarts.

Installation and maintenance of pkgs/resource groups are a bit more
tedious in SC. You need to balance that against the clusters various
capabilities for diagnosing and handling faults. For instance, in HP
Service Guard, I could probably set up a custom package with storage
and networking in a day. Based on limited experience with Sun Cluster,
it might take two.

The clusters have been solid. No unplanned outages for quite some time.
DBAs and end-users are happy with performance.

On top of UFS?  Or on top of QFS?  I know UFS supports journaling and
has come a long way but I wasn't aware that a lot of people are
running production Oracle instances on top of UFS.

-Sanjay

That's an iteresting mix ;-)  I was thinking of going with QFS for
my RAC implementation.  I've used Veritas Storage Foundation for
RAC but management is trying to get away from Symantec/Veritas
for "business reasons".

Quote:> Veritas used to make the argument that the DMP multipath driver offered
> better load balancing. From what I have read on MPxIO (been out of
> Solaris world for a while), round-robin is the default (only??) load
> balancing model. Truthfully, not sure if it makes much difference in
> 95% of the cases.

Not in my case.  Availability is definitely a concern, but performance
isn't as important - the stuff just doesn't get many queries.

Quote:> If using OPS/RAC, you need your DBAs to bring down Oracle instances for
> node or cluster shutdown. Instance control not included as part of a
> package/resource group in this configuration. Just means more
> coordination and people involved during restarts.

But if I did RAC inside of Sun Cluster I should be able to bring down
the instances thru the clutsering software, right?

How else would SC manage fail-over then?

Thank you everyone for your feedback.

-Sanjay

First for some years I used raw-devices on top on SVM.
Last time I switched to SVM+UFS(forcedirectio).

--
                                                Robert Milkowski

                                                http://milek.blogspot.com

Sanjay

Just wanted to follow up. Sorry I did not do it sooner.

In regards to the multi-pathing solution, when I said " not sure if it
makes a difference" I was speaking about the load balancing policy.
Multipathing is indeed the important part, but how the load balancing
is done across those paths is not that big a deal in most cases.

In regards to OPS, I am pretty sure OPS requires raw devices. Not sure
about RAC.

In OPS on Sun Cluster, you do not control the instances through the
cluster. The instances must me brought up and down by the DBAs after
the cluster has started. The cluster only controls the cluster
framework, which includes the  distributed lock manager, but not the
actual instances.

Scott