help with Oracle on SUN with Veritas Volume manager

[bookouri]

We're installing our first SUN database server with Oracle 8.1.7. The vendor delivered the server with Veritas Volume Manager installed and one mount point configured for Oracle. The machine has one controller for the 6 drives dedicated to Oracle and the file system is configured as a raid 5 array. Where can I find documentation to describe how to configure/set up an Oracle database on this system? Why did the vendor add the Veritas Volume manager? What does Veritas give me that the SUN wouldnt by itself?

any comments/suggestions would be appreciated..

 

[MikeLacey]

The oracle installation manual is quite good, it's certainly an appropriate starting point.

Look for the section on creating an OFA compliant database setup.

Do this before you do anything else, and make sure the mount point for the RAID5 is named the way you want. Mike
________________________________________________________________

"Experience is the comb that Nature gives us, after we are bald."

Is that a haiku?
I never could get the hang
of writing those things.

 

[spenglerr]

Hi

actually it will be no problem to work with the Oracle database on the RAID configured by Veritas Volume Manager.

Since you have a RAID 5 !!!
DO NEVER PUT YOUR REDO-LOGS ON IT. That's everything.

So you should install your database to have the datafiles on the RAID, but not the redo log groups. This has s.th. to do with the read/write access of the database writer on the redo-logs. You will get performance problems when these files are on the RAID 5.

There is a nice article from Quest about the features in general with a nice overview where to put which files:

http://www.sloug.org/presentations/123.ppt

 

[bookouri]

thanks for the replys. I have plenty of space on my other drives for the redo logs, that will be easy. Using the one controller Veritas/RAID5 setup is there any point in separating the files per Oracle's recommendations, u01, u02, u03 etc.

 

[spenglerr]

No, that's the fortune of a RAID, that you will not have to split your datafiles to physical partitions since the controller will do this for you. Of course you can create logical volumes on your RAID, but this would only make the DBA-tasks concerning datafiles more complex.

These Oracle recommendations are not for RAID-systems. If you have separate disks, then you would use a mount point for every disk and then split tablespaces in that way that tables and indexes are not on the same hard disk and that read/write-access is equally distributed to the hard dics. On a RAID this efforts are useless, since the RAID-controller will do this for you.

 

[bookouri]

Thanks, that's the first real answer Ive been able to get out of anyone about installing on RAID5. Do you have any suggestions about the subdirectory heirarchy to use with Oracle. Since I wont need to use the u01, u02 stuff, Ill install oracle under oracle/app/8.1.7 or something like that and just put all the data files under a /data subdirectory.

thanks again

 

[spenglerr]

Actually this is correct.

Normally I install the Oracle software together with the other software in the standard path /opt. This has s.th. to do with UNIX organization.

Applications are installed in /opt or /usr/local. We prefer to install vendor software in /opt and public domain software in /usr/local, since you get a lot precompiled public domain software already configured for this.

Only our datafiles are on the RAID5 or mirrored systems.
We madethe experience that mirroring the software itself is often not the best choice (don't ask me why it's just practical experience that the database software made problems when installed on mirrored disks. It even got worse when trying to do this with iAS).

 

[bookouri]

The original vendor installed the old application, oracle, the datafiles, everything on one big RAID5 array on our old NT4 servers. I always kind of wondered if it was a bad idea to actually have Oracle itself installed on the RAID5 volume. They've always been plagued with poor performance, but operationally everything has been pretty smooth with it. The NT servers actually turned out to be stable, if not speedy.

thanks again for all the help