Re: NFS on a 10g RAC cluster

Well, for every good experience, there's an equally compelling bad experience lurking somewhere I suspect. While I've known many successful deployments of NFS supporting Oracle DBs (apparently, you're one of them), I haven't been so lucky. I have seen many problems and have avoided it whenever possible in the last several years. So, my information may be a little dated and maybe I should take another look. I've never found a compelling argument FOR using NFS for Oracle and it's always seemed to be near equal in cost to the iSCSI solutions that I've had good luck with in the past few years. So, when there has been a decision to make, I've usually suggested using iSCSI instead of NFS and that's worked well in my experiences.

So, I wouldn't refuse to work on a system using NFS, it would just be my 2nd choice when there are other options (and there usually are).

Dan

• Original Message ---- From: D'Hooge Freek <Freek.D'Hooge_at_uptime.be> To: "dannorris_at_dannorris.com" <dannorris_at_dannorris.com>; "krish.hariharan_at_quasardb.com" <krish.hariharan_at_quasardb.com>; "Jon.Crisler_at_usi.com" <Jon.Crisler_at_usi.com> Cc: Oracle-L Freelists <oracle-l_at_freelists.org> Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 4:08:39 PM Subject: RE: NFS on a 10g RAC cluster

Dan,

If I understood Jon's original question correctly, he does not want to  place his datafiles on nfs, but instead setup an nfs server on one of  the rac nodes and he wanted to know if there was a way to let the nfs  server failover from one rac node to the other.

BTW, Is there any particular reason why you are not a fan of putting  Oracle databases on NFS? I must say I have rather good experiences with  it.

regards,

Freek D'Hooge
Uptime
Oracle Database Administrator
e-mail: freek.dhooge_at_uptime.be
tel. +32 (0)3 451 23 82
http://www.uptime.be
disclaimer

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On  Behalf Of Dan Norris [dannorris_at_dannorris.com] Sent: 10 December 2007 22:59
To: krish.hariharan_at_quasardb.com; Jon.Crisler_at_usi.com 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_at_quasardb.com" <krish.hariharan_at_quasardb.com> To: Jon.Crisler_at_usi.com Cc: Oracle-L Freelists <oracle-l_at_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

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Mon Dec 10 2007 - 17:21:00 CST