RE: ASM Risk / Rewards

Hi Steve
As I am currently in the thick of a PS upgrade project where we are using RAC 10G on Linux with ASM, I guess I can give you some half reasonable answers.  

Firstly you must have a very small peoplesoft installation to be considering only one database, I assume you mean only one Production database. here we have three, production a testing environment where users can do adhoc reporting, its refreshed each night and a sandpit where the users can construct new business processes. we have over 60 clustered and single instance databases currently running one one GRID and e now have three Grids aka clusters, one for the DBA's to hurt badly to expand skills to have the ability to feel comfortable recovering from most problems, node failures, SAN failures and anything else like initial patch testing
A second for Testing Development and other similar tasks like to test patches and peopletools upgrades and then the new production grid .  

I guess your choice of Windows as your platform is due to no Linux skills, because if you have Linux skills then you really should be going Linux.  

Database manageability is rather easy with ASM. As the DBA you get to tune pretty near the entire tech stack as you now are down to your SAN. I assume you are using SAN storage.  

You can mirror your database between SAN's even where the SAN's are up to 100k's apart i.e. extended RAC.  

If you are doing RAC for production you need to do RAC for your test environment as you need a parallel environment to test out applying patches to clusterware and then ASM if you use it.  

When you run out of space in your RAW volume how will you extend that space ASM its dead easy simply add disk hot on the fly no downtime, I don't think you get that with RAW.  

people say that there are problems in ASM, its not perfect but we are not experiencing any show stoppers. For the development and testing environment we have a lot of databases and ASM has proven highly useful in that environment, just add more disk and create more databases, RAW will be a harder.  

We dont have our prodcution running with users but we are going to start testing with load testing very soon, next few weeks so we shall be identifying issues then, I hope :-)  

If you have anything more specific about this site we can take it offline.  

Cheers  

Peter      

From: steve montgomerie [mailto:stmontgo_at_gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, 30 August 2007 11:00 PM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: ASM Risk / Rewards

Good day,
We're doing the PeopleSoft upgrade thing which includes an upgrade from Oracle 9i to 10G Rel2.

Our environment will be Windows 2003 with RAC 10G.

As part of the upgrade I see from the Oracle Docs that Oracle recommends using ASM. I've been reading researching and testing on a smaller machine getting read for the new hardware.

I'm to the conclusion that ASM would only help with the disk rebalancing feature. The environment is only 1 database on RAC so provisioning does not buy me much from my point of view. Yes I understand that ASM is RAW, like RAW or whatever. However if I wanted to get RAW like performance then I could just use RAW.

Yes, there is a question in this rant.

Are the rewards of ASM appreciable enough for me to implement it on the new system?

If I do ASM on RAC should I do ASM in the non clustered test environments just to be consistent.

Do you have any feedback on your production ASM experiences?

Thanks for any feedback.

Steve

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