Re: 12i Apps on Rac - ASM or OCSF

Kathy,

I'm afraid that our experience is quite opposite. First of all, there shouldn't be any difference for Apps whether database is running on ASM and cluster filesystem. There could be slight variations in install procedure but that's pretty much it.

I have a customer that we are migrating from 9i (cold failover cluster) to 10g RAC on Solaris including their 11i Apps. We moved from Veritas Cluster Filesystem to ASM for several reasons - simplify infrastructure, cut costs, get rid of one additional vendor.

Note that Veritas CFS is far more superior product than OCFS2 and generally speaking even ASM but ASM is designed specially for Oracle database and Oracle took some advantage of it in a good way but that's another story and there was enough discussions on that.

Now, we have few other customers that use OCFS2 and we hit bugs with it regularly! Except the first releases of 10g with few nasty bugs, we didn't hit major ASM issues (there are some potential issues specific to VLDBs and very high workload but you really need to kick it hard).

Some customers choose to use OCFS2 for backup destination and ASM for database and those configurations are most unstable as OCFS doesn't really integrate with CRS so in effect you have two separate clusterware products running side by side - no good.

If you heard that ASM is more complex than OCFS - that's a real joke! One of the primary goals of ASM is to simplify storage management and it does it pretty well up to the certain volume of storage (there is some environments where more established storage platforms (like one from Veritas) give some serious provisioning benefits).

We moved quite a bit of customers to ASM and in every case the complexity has gone down. Don't take me wrong - I'm not the one to go blindly for ASM in every case and it's not fit for some cases yet (and I bloged few times about it) but my experience with it is very good so far.

If you can give details on what you heard about "issues with ASM on Oracle Apps", I'm 99% sure that it's not specific to Oracle Apps (at least on day-to-day support) and I should be able to prove it. I know that Apps people are *often* more conservative and one of the reasons is that traditionally they had to run on "pre-current" release of Oracle and their software rollout cycles are pretty slow.

Hope this helps,
Alex

On 9/13/07, kathy duret <katpopins21_at_yahoo.com> wrote:
> We are going through this debate right now.
>
> Our 12i Oracle Apps will be Oracle 10.2 on Linux Oracle Unbreakable, Dell
> hardware. EMC San Storage.
>
> Dell is pushing OCSF and Oracle is pushing ASM
>
> I have heard there are issues with ASM on Oracle Apps, others say that is
> old news.
>
> Anyone out there using OCSF or ASM on Oracle Apps in a Rac environment care
> to toss in there hat and let me know the dirt?
>
> I here ASM is a bit more complex especially on a SAN environment and you get
> better performance. But I heard there are bugs with Oracle Apps / Rac and
> you are less able
> to troubleshoot issues without Oracle Support.
>
> Anyone with any real experiences, both pro and con?
>
> Thanks again.
>
> Kathy
>
> ________________________________
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>

-- 
Alex Gorbachev, Oracle DBA Brewer, The Pythian Group
http://www.pythian.com/blogs/author/alex http://www.oracloid.com
BAAG party - www.BattleAgainstAnyGuess.com
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