RE: Oracle 10g R2 RAC on Sun Solaris 10 with EMC storage

 >>>

Oracle clusterware reboots servers for "fencing". If you like that, don't use the VCS or Sun Cluster skgxn libraries. This is a platform that offers clusterware choices at least. Be happy. Linux and windows ports of Oracle do not integrate with host clusterware.

There is a reason Oracle 10gR2 still integrates with host clusterware on "real servers" (e.g., Sol,HP/UX,AIX). The reason is that CRS is not fully baked.

>>>
>>>* ) Is cluster filesystem a compulsory component or Can I
>>>use ASM instead of Cluster File system.

Yes you can use RAW disk. That is what ASM is.

>>>* ) Are there any known risks invovled in using ASM. How is
>>>the I/O performance with ASM on EMC with Solaris ? what are
>>>the risks involved

ASM I/O is on par with RAW. Guess why. Because ASM is RAW. Risk? ASM is a new, late comer to volume management. It requires functional Oracle instances to "see" the contents of the space it manages. ASM is only for database objects to exclude external tables. Everything else requires a filesystem and in a cluster, it makes sense for that to be a cluster filesystem...but that is an opinion--albiet one shared by a lot of people (VAXen were pretty popular).

>>>
>>>* ) If I don't use cluster filesystem where to put CRS
>>>repository and voting disk ? Do I have any option other than
>>>raw partition

no. RAW is your only alternative.

>>>
>>>* ) What is best option for Oracle_Home, shared oracle home
>>>or sepereate oracle_home on each node ?

Religious wars ensue. I say shared. How much duplicated effort you like is your choice to make. There is no such thing as a rolling upgrade with RAC, so ignore the FUD.

>>>* ) Is GigE okay for interconnect or do I need to go for Infiniband ?

Depends on the load. High speed interconnects (e.g., Infiniband, SCI, etc)
are most interesting in tough scalability scenarios. Those scenarios are generally processor bound. Unfortunately, CPU bound systems do not benefit at all from high speed interconect. Messages are delivered faster, but the message receiver is piled up behind other runable processes. Typical cluster scalability problem.

>>>
>>>* ) Is there any notes on Best practices for the above components

Most likely not.

>>>
>>>*) Do I need to consider fail over option for NIC's
>>>(interconnect and public), if yes, how to do that ?

Seems you are spending a tremendous amount of money on RAC, it might make sense to pay for HW redundancy as well.

>>>*) Are there any other risks do I need to consider ?

Yes. Most certainly.

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