Re: NFS on a 10g RAC cluster

From: Dan Norris <dannorris_at_dannorris.com>
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2007 15:16:59 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <107328.63817.qm@web35404.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Hi Jon, I misinterpreted the question and took an opportunity to get on my soapbox--sorry about that. Yes, I believe that you should be able to set up NFS Server as a resource (or group of resources) under management of Oracle Clusterware. Pretty much any process that you can start, stop, and check is eligible for Clusterware management. If you want to see some examples, check out these links: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/clusterware/pdf/TWP-Oracle-Clusterware-3rd-party.pdf http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/clusterware/pdf/SI_DB_Failover_11g.pdf (as an example--good scripts here) http://www.oracle.com/technology/sample_code/products/rac/zip/sifo_action_scripts.zip http://www.oracle.com/technology/sample_code/products/rac/zip/crs_asagent.zip In general, you'd want to have some VIP address that clients of the NFS service use to access the NFS mounts. I'm not an NFS expert, but I expect there are some NFS server daemons that you may need to restart (possibly to bind to the new IP) and you'll certainly want to run some exportfs commands or equivalent. You might also need to fail over some of the underlying storage if you're not using a CFS. This is essentially rebuilding what has already been done in a commercial offering by Polyserve (now HP) with their Enterprise File Services Clustered Gateway (EFS-CG) product (though they use customized NFS server code--not stock Linux NFS server code so I'm told). I've never used it personally--just read about it, so this isn't an endorsement, just awareness: http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/efs/index.html Dan ----- Original Message ---- From: "Crisler, Jon" <Jon.Crisler@usi.com> To: Dan Norris <dannorris@dannorris.com>; krish.hariharan@quasardb.com Cc: Oracle-L Freelists <oracle-l@freelists.org> Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 4:03:29 PM Subject: RE: NFS on a 10g RAC cluster  I think I may have stated the problem a bit ambiguously – the intent was not to store database files on NFS, but rather to host NFS on the same platform, and let CRS manage and failover the NFS daemons. CRS can be extended to manage non-Oracle applications. The database is already built and running via ASM storage to a SAN. From: Dan Norris [mailto:dannorris@dannorris.com] Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 5:00 PM To: krish.hariharan@quasardb.com; Crisler, Jon Cc: Oracle-L Freelists Subject: Re: NFS on a 10g RAC cluster I'm not a fan of putting Oracle DBs on NFS. Furthermore, as this list shows: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/clustering/certify/tech_generic_unix_new.html, only a relatively small handful of specialized NFS appliances/software are supported for RAC. That is, you can't take the typical UNIX NFS server implementation and use it to run RAC in a supported way. If you don't care about support and just want to build a sandbox, it may work fine--I've used OpenFiler for sandboxes and it worked well for my functional (not load) testing. Dan ----- Original Message ---- From: "krish.hariharan@quasardb.com" <krish.hariharan@quasardb.com> To: Jon.Crisler@usi.com Cc: Oracle-L Freelists <oracle-l@freelists.org> Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 1:37:46 PM Subject: Re: NFS on a 10g RAC cluster Jon, From discussions with a Unix architect, I understood that read-write nfs has some holes that our security teams did not like. We however use read only nfs routinely in many environments. The issues were: 1. Security did not like us using nfs, especially read-write 2. In our Solaris environments, in some older OS releases, stale nfs mounts were problematic. A question though: Is there a reason why you wouldn't have the nfs mounts on all nodes of the RAC and perhaps control access to that mount point through, say the services framework as opposed to failing the mount point to different nodes? -Krish -- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l

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Received on Mon Dec 10 2007 - 17:16:59 CST