Re: RAC Experiences

From: Don Granaman <granaman_at_cox.net>
Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 21:59:48 -0400
Message-ID: <003d01c439cc$8d7fa180$6401a8c0@dilbert>

No experience since the early Cretaceous with OPS or RAC on AIX, but regarding point (3):

Actually, I think *any* vendor's cluster software will handle "heterogeneous boxes quite well". All that is usually required is the same (or similar - see later) version of the OS, Oracle, and the cluster management software on all nodes.

I've run Sun PDB 7.3.4.x and 8.1.x.x OPS clusters with quite asymmetric hardware with no problems (for days or weeks). I am currently in the process of upgrading the two nodes of a Dell/RedHat/Linux/EMC cluster - one node (the one not yet replaced) is a much older Dell server running AS 2.1 and the other is a much newer and faster server running ES 3.0 (same kernel as AS 2.1). The process is (1) Move all processes to node B, (2) Replace node A with new hardware, (3) shift all processing to Node A, (4) replace node B, (5) split processing between nodes again. [Due to extraneous factors, this time there is a step (2.5) - split processing between old node B and new node A and run for a while.]

Picky, picky, picky point: I call this an "asymmetric" rather than "heterogeneous" cluster since all that is really significantly different is the hardware. It isn't like one node runs HP-UX and the other runs Solaris - or Windows(!)

-Don Granaman
OraSaurus

Original Message ----- From: "John P Weatherman" <asahoshi_at_infionline.net> To: "oracle-l" <oracle-l_at_freelists.org> Sent: Thursday, May 13, 2004 7:51 AM Subject: RAC Experiences

> All,
> Given some of the recent postings on RAC, we are probably crazy to
continue looking at it. Still, we have an app that we can see scaling to 40+ CPUs in the next year and want some way to avoid buying ever bigger servers (with the attendant ever bigger $$) to handle it. Currently we are looking at IBM and are left with a few questions:
>
> 1) Is anyone running production RAC on AIX and what has the experience
been from a reliability standpoint? Administrative difficulties? Etc?
>
> 2) Is anyone running production RAC on Linux on IBM hardware and what has
the experience been from a reliability standpoint? Administrative difficulties? Etc?
>
> 3) IBM claims that their cluster software handles heterogeneous boxes
quite well. We are considering the possibility of getting 3 4-way 530s to "prove out" and get RAC running. Later we would add in 650s for scaling up. Eventually the 530s go away and become something else, like a test RAC. Has anyone been running RAC in a heterogeneous environment and what have your experiences been?
>
> Any practical experience feedback would be greatly appreciated.
>
> TIA,
>
> John P Weatherman
> Oracle Database Administrator
> Advance America
>
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Received on Thu May 13 2004 - 21:09:20 CDT