Re: Looking for suggestions regarding cluster filesystems for linux
Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2011 11:27:19 -0400
Message-ID: <CADH15Ggkex06uqL6FwqY91cXy3jSH54TqJ9vU9SB2s6pn20P9Q_at_mail.gmail.com>
Hi Maureen,
> We have a 4 node Linux RHEL5 cluster with an OCFS2 filesystem.
>
[ ... cut ... ]
>
> Currently, if we have 16 databases, 4 on each node, the output for 1
report for
> each database will end up on one of the 4 nodes. If we need to change a
script
> or add a new script, we need to do the same thing 4 times. We can keep
the files
> in sync across the nodes via rsync, but it would be so much easier if we
could
> have a shared filesystem for our scripts.
May I ask why you have that many databases? Do you have a database for each of your applications? Unless your corporate policies prevent from doing this, you might consider have a single database with multiple schemas. You would have a better memory utilization by having more schemas inside less databases. Not to mention that it would be easier to maintain, backup and recover. Be sure to use services and keep an eye on your user's grants if you decide to consolidate your databases.
> The current plan is to use NFS to mount a shared filesystem, but I'm
wondering
> if there are any other suggestions that anyone has. Do others have
nothing but
> databases on clustered systems, or do you also have users on these systems
and
> thus need to deal with the same issue?
We use NFS. Be sure to have a robust NFS system because if it goes down, you lose your script storage. If you have auditing and compliance on those script output, that could cause you some headaches. You can also modify your scripts to use syslog and send all the logs both locally and to a central syslog server with all it's benefits. Finally, ACFS could be an interesting option. But IMHO it's still a new technology and should be used with caution. ACFS also adds another layer to your stack: storage, OCFS2, ASM then ACFS.
Have fun, HTH,
David
-- David Robillard UNIX team leader, Oracle DBA and IT architect http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidrobillard http://itdavid.blogspot.com/ -- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Wed Oct 05 2011 - 10:27:19 CDT