RE: 9I RAC corporate standard.

Well, we evaluated 9iRAC on some cheap-o Linux boxes as a proof-of-concept, with the hardware idea based on
http://www.bradmark.com/site2/products/pdfs/9irac_config.pdf As far as I'm concerned, RAC's a major pain, unstable and not yet worth the risk -- for us. The idea for us being that we could move a DB or three to this RAC system with a no-cost OS on commodity hardware giving us HA and some load-balancing.

I tried installing RHAS 2.1 ($60 duhveloper edition), but it's so old (based on RH7.2) that it couldn't identify our newish hardware (Intel D845 MB). Without a clear path to add kernel mods to allow HW identification, I installed SuSE SLES8. Yipe! Never did get far on that one. Way too many library/kernel issues to consider it. I finally ended up testing on RH9 because it could identify our hardware, I have some familiarity with it, and there are docs on the web (e.g. http://www.puschitz.com) to help get Oracle9i installed on it. I didn't have time to try United Linux, although it does come with a 2.4-19 kernel.

Once that was resolved, I wanted to use a filesystem for Oracle, given the limitations of RAW on SCSI under Linux (max 15 partitions), so I downloaded OCFS 1.09. Well, it wouldn't install because of RH9's newer kernel (it was only made to work on RHAS2.1). And when I tried to compile the source, I got errors. So I patched the OCFS source with a modified version of a JFS patch for RH9 and it worked. Unfortunately though, it didn't perform, peaking out at about 1.2MB/s peak throughput and I switched to RAW (40-50 times faster). There's also the ocfstool that you need for monitoring because OCFS only allows contiguous file extents. Veritas is supposed to have a VxFS for Linux as a beta soon...

There's not enough room here for me to go over the software install hell to get RAC actually on the systems. And anything Java-based (Installer, DBCA, OEM, etc.) most of the time flat out refused to run without any errors. I thought this was odd considering I didn't have any problem with other non-Oracle Java programs. Finally, when I called in a problem to Oracle Support regarding DBCA, I thought I had a decent tech until I was warned by him that my SHMMAX kernel setting was too high because it was over physical RAM. Also, I've had a helluva time trying to understand the 9iRAC client setup. I haven't found any Oracle docs yet that explain it well.

Granted, some/much/all of this is probably because I'm running on an "unsupported" version of Linux. My problem with that is that it shouldn't freakin matter. With my luck at getting 9.2.0.4 to run on Gentoo, I just might try 9iRAC on there... :) I would *love* to try 9iRAC on OpenVMS. It should be by far the easiest to install and maintain, given the clustering is builtin to the OS.

Gotta go redo some lvols now...

GL! You'll need it!

Rich

Rich Jesse                           System/Database Administrator
rjesse_at_qtiworld.com                  Quad/Tech Inc, Sussex, WI USA

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Spears, Brian [mailto:BSpears_at_Limitedbrands.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2003 4:24 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
> Subject: 9I RAC corporate standard.
>
>
>
> Hi, Has anyone started to implement 9I Rac as a corporate
> standard... IE. many or all the apps being deployed on 9I RAC
> clusters?
>
> We are looking at doing it and wanted to know what other
> people had as experience in doing it or on the way to attempting it.
>
> If so, what hardware platform are you using? HP Itanium or
> Linux boxes etc?

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Author: Jesse, Rich
  INET: Rich.Jesse_at_qtiworld.com

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