RE: 64 node Oracle RAC Cluster (The reality of...)

 >Actually, I was talking about GFS, by Red Hat. For OCFS, I
>read not to use it for ORACLE_HOME, but when I tried with GFS,
>it was extremely slow. I was impressed with the GFS until I
>tried using it for ORACLE_HOME.

that is because GFS (Sistina) is implemented via a central lock and metadata server (bottleneck,SPOF). On the other hand, our customers implement shared executable directories (ORACLE_HOME) on very large clusters all the time. Implementaion details are important. Symmetric, distributed is more difficult to implement but better (that is why most CFSes like VRTS,GFS,GPFS and others are central metadata/lock server approaches - time to market).

>Speaking of the operating
>systems, do you know whether RAC is supported on Solaris/x86?

Larry killed Solx86 with his reluctance to port 9i to it...however, Sol10 is both Open Source (people have been trying to convince me that is a good thing for many years) and has Oracle ports upcoming. I think Sol10 on Opteron is going to be a really smart move...and unfortunately one my own company wont be playing in :-( (marketing reasons).

>I must say that Solaris is much, much, much more mature OS

yes of course.

>then Linux. My company has a bunch of Dell boxes running RH EL
>3.0 and I am not at all satisfied with the performance and

Redhat 3.0 is implemented on a veritable franken-kernel with bits and pieces of really old 2.4 stuff, over burdoned with hugemem 4:4 split and other oddities. SuSE distributions are worth a try.

>reliability. It seems that popularity of an OS grows
>proportionally with its crappiness.

the best technology usually doesn't win. But customers routinely buying the worst technology amazingly doesn't help curb that phenomenon much :) Can you say SPARCcenter 2000 :)

>
>--
>Mladen Gogala
>Oracle DBA
>
>
>--
>http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
>

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