Re: oracle-l Digest V15 #44 / for: "RAC install on Linux"

Dear all, Orlando, Niall,

     For: "RAC install on Linux" and in addition to what Niall correctly said, particularly for:

> 1) I am looking for a step by step instruction guide if any one has it. Or
> point me to a good link. I am more interested in the OS settings,
> os patches, potential trips, etc,
The documentation typically has all the up-to-date information for an Oracle RAC / GI installation, as Niall said. Please, note that online-documentation is updated under its lifetime and hence is more up-to-date than the printed versions would have been. The documentation covers minimum requirements and to some degree recommendations but is really designed to cover fundamentals, for which reason even the hardware and software minimum requirements sections have become rather long and one is likely to perhaps overlook a step or two, as you, Orlando, said.

My recommendation in addition to reading the documentation is therefore to use tools like Cluster Verification Utility (CVU) and ORAchk early on during the installation process to check for "/OS settings,//os patches, potential trips, etc,/". CVU checks for optimized OS parameter settings and whether the installation will meet installation requirements (which includes checks for available memory and so forth). ORAchk goes beyond that and will check your system against best practices recommendations. This eliminates the need to go through the documentation and MOS notes to find those, as ORAchk gets his information directly from MOS and its checks are permanently updated and enhanced to cover the latest best and practices recommendations. For this reason, ORAchk can (and should be) downloaded separately from MOS note "ORAchk - Health Checks for the Oracle Stack (Doc ID 1268927.2)".

More information about CVU and ORAchk and how they compare (among other things) can be found in slides 17 to 26 of this slide deck https://www.slideshare.net/MarkusMichalewicz/oracle-rac-12c-rel-2-best-practices-ukoug-tech17

For "/potential trips/"; frankly, those "trips" will find its way into the Oracle Documentation or ORAchk only once a solution is found, as the intention of those tools is to provide a solution not just to warn about "an issue". Thus, if there is an issue, especially on newly released OS versions (e.g. freshly released Linux updates), they are typically first covered in (non-Oracle) blogs, then in MOS notes and then in ORAchk while the latter is updated more frequently than the GI and / or database software for this matter. ORAchk will also list all the checks it covers in its "Health Check Catalog". That said, a quick search on the internet will probably go a long way for finding "potential trips", especially for newly released OS versions (I.E. updates / patches). As the OS version matures, the tools should cover them as explained. Note in this context, please, that OS updates are not tested separately by Oracle (unlike the OS version for which a given database version is certified).

Example: for Linux 7.2 I have heard that "kernel-3.10.0-693.11.6..el7" would cause an ACFS related install / check error, which can be ignored, if ACFS is not being used (for now), while for kernel-3.10.0-327.el7, CVU would complain about wrong mount options in case NFS is used. Neither I have confirmed yet, but Oracle is looking into it. Once those issues are verified, (CVU) checks will be updated based on new recommendations.

Hope that helps. Thanks,
        Markus

Markus Michalewicz | Senior Director of Product Management Oracle Real Application Clusters, ST Development “ConnectConnect with me on LinkedIn
<https://www.linkedin.com/pub/markus-michalewicz/4/99a/a99> | Twitter (_at_OracleRACpm) <https://twitter.com/OracleRACpm>

On 2/13/18 10:05 PM, FreeLists Mailing List Manager wrote:
> oracle-l Digest Tue, 13 Feb 2018 Volume: 15 Issue: 044
>
> In This Issue:
> Re: RAC install on Linux
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
.....
> ------------------------------
>
> From: Niall Litchfield <niall.litchfield_at_gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 12:26:00 +0000
> Subject: Re: RAC install on Linux
>
> Hi
> The best guide is the official documentation. You can and should supplement
> this with the Cluster Verification Utility cluvfy https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__docs.oracle&d=DwIBAg&c=RoP1YumCXCgaWHvlZYR8PZh8Bv7qIrMUB65eapI_JnE&r=NkZwk-V9NuyOAn87yC71TkULn082mXtqun0H-klOR5M&m=SxvmzYDEQ5ZY9p1uM-I9qmJnNwUvfrC8yVG86oKf_HQ&s=LFI6OWDuj1IiU5uLrmp0j9NLmRjKIAYgtd2oAE87870&e=.
> com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/12.2/cwadd/cluster-
> verification-utility-reference.html#GUID-B445A858-
> 9F00-4423-990E-109545AC11C3 and the orachk tool which you can get from
> Note 1268927.2 - cluvfy will verify you meet the documented requirements as
> you describe. orachk adds some best practice type checks to the mix, in the
> case of cluvfy get the latest 12.1 version, in the case of orachk just get
> the latest. If you have a laptop and some time working through RACAttack
> might help you understand what is going on
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__en.wikibooks.org_wiki_RAC-5FAttack-5F-2D-5FOracle-5FCluster-5FDatabase-5Fat-5FHome_RAC-5FAttack-5F12c&d=DwIBAg&c=RoP1YumCXCgaWHvlZYR8PZh8Bv7qIrMUB65eapI_JnE&r=NkZwk-V9NuyOAn87yC71TkULn082mXtqun0H-klOR5M&m=SxvmzYDEQ5ZY9p1uM-I9qmJnNwUvfrC8yVG86oKf_HQ&s=mISz5f8gfpb0jrPU8D5_aQBwzqSfT_xxE8Qv_kBsmS8&e=
> . At
> this stage of the lifecyle, I'd definitely suggest you consider 12.2 rather
> than 12.1 unless you have a good reason to stick on 12.1.
>
> Simulating production load is a hard task - and tools that do it well do
> cost quite a lot - if you have an in-house dev team you might be licensed
> for load testing tools already. You might however consider an artificial
> benchmark such as swingbench <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__dominicgiles.com_swingbench.html&d=DwIBAg&c=RoP1YumCXCgaWHvlZYR8PZh8Bv7qIrMUB65eapI_JnE&r=NkZwk-V9NuyOAn87yC71TkULn082mXtqun0H-klOR5M&m=SxvmzYDEQ5ZY9p1uM-I9qmJnNwUvfrC8yVG86oKf_HQ&s=_HeoBaz-Np8uJvPnBqdZbxKUZ9u-CjQtL5Rd_jPF1vI&e=> and
> compare the performance of the existing setup with the new one. This won't
> be an exact guide to *your* application but should give you some idea of
> differences between the platforms. If you are changing processors I'm a fan
> of using the SLOB <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__kevinclosson.net_slob_&d=DwIBAg&c=RoP1YumCXCgaWHvlZYR8PZh8Bv7qIrMUB65eapI_JnE&r=NkZwk-V9NuyOAn87yC71TkULn082mXtqun0H-klOR5M&m=SxvmzYDEQ5ZY9p1uM-I9qmJnNwUvfrC8yVG86oKf_HQ&s=kHn69lzUp_fCMhqKtDqu6BiFL9BA9iFWPjQb4UCRgd8&e=> LIO benchmark to measure
> raw oracle CPU performance and if changing storage then using the PIO
> benchmark to measure that.
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 4:33 AM, Orlando L <oralrnr_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> List
>>
>> We are planning to install Oracle RAC 12.1 on Linux 7.
>>
>> 1) I am looking for a step by step instruction guide if any one has it. Or
>> point me to a good link. I am more interested in the OS settings,
>> os patches, potential trips, etc,
>>
>> It should be straight forward till I saw today in the official Grid
>> infrastructure install guide that you should disable Transparent Huge pages
>> in Linux and that it is enabled by default. I started wondering what else
>> I could have missed buried in there.
>>
>> 2) Another thing helpful would be any tool that we could use to simulate
>> the current production load in the new env. I considered RAT, but that is
>> out of qn because of the $
>>
>> Thanks
>> Orlando.
>>
>
>

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