RE: Is ASMLIB required for NetApp's SMO on RHEL 6 when using VMWare?
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2012 16:17:16 +0000
Message-ID: <9F15274DDC89C24387BE933E68BE3FD32FE976_at_MISOUT7MSGUSR9D.ITServices.sbc.com>
I believe you need oracleasm installed, and I would suggest having it as it makes the sysadmin and dba's job easier for disk administration. One of the issues you might run into is persistant names for WWN, disk volume etc., and oracleasm helps keep that straight. It also makes it easier if you are adding and removing disks and doing disk migration (like EMC to NetApp, or from one NetApp frame to another etc.) without any downtime.
A couple of points:
- make sure your multipath.conf is set up per NetApps best practices
- friendly names = YES - not supported on Linux with Snapmanager- you need friendly names = NO (at least in a SAN - FC setup which is what I have)
- use the correct version of the Netapp host utilities
- Snapmanager on Windows is a pain- I would recommend only using it on Linux
- The Oracle host needs network connectivity into the NetApp filers management interface and the Snap Manager server.
- for Snapmanager make sure to put a reasonable tune on the underlying Oracle db (the Snapmanager repository)- it can have performance problems if you just do a standard install and neglect it.
- you might consider NetApp with Direct NFS which I am told works pretty good and bypasses the whole ASM thing, but you then lose all the ASM benefits and go back to the filesystem way of doing things. Performance seems just as good though.
- Make sure you test Snapmanager thoroughly.
- make sure you test the NetApp controller switchover - giveback - its sensitive to network configuration and easy to misconfigure.
-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Alex Fatkulin
Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2012 5:20 PM
To: dananrg_at_yahoo.com
Cc: ORACLE-L
Subject: Re: Is ASMLIB required for NetApp's SMO on RHEL 6 when using VMWare?
> But our sysadmins say, in a VMWare environment, that ASM diskgroups look like plain SCSI to RHEL 6. And have suggested ASMLIB is therefore not required.
He probably meant iSCSI devices, not ASM disk groups. That's true since iSCSI stands for Internet SCSI, i.e. encapsulates SCSI protocol so you can run it over your network. The devices then look as any other SCSI device to the OS.
The requirement you quoted is from SnapManager and that might be relevant -- perhaps SnapManager was coded with some assumptions about asmlib presented in the system? It certainly should not be a generic requirement.
-- Alex Fatkulin, http://afatkulin.blogspot.com Enkitec, http://www.enkitec.com -- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Thu Jun 28 2012 - 11:17:16 CDT