Re: D1000, Veritas, and Oracle Parallel Server questions

Allen wrote:

> I'm a DBA and the company I recently started working at is using 2 Sun
> e220 servers hooked up to a D1000 unit running Veritas volume manager
> (also running Oracle 8.1.6 and Solaris 7). Right now Veritas monitors the
> database on server #1 and if it goes down, it brings up the DB on server
> #2.. These sun boxes share the drives in the D1000 where the oracle
> datafiles are installed.

So are you using Veritas Cluster server or another cluster software?

>
>
> Down the road, we're expecting a huge increase in the amount of data being
> processed and stored in Oracle (24x7), and I suspect we'll need to move to
> a parallel server environment (OPS).
>
> Being a newbie to OPS, I believe I read somewhere that OPS requires raw
> devices. Does this mean we will not be using Veritas volume manager if we
> switch to OPS, or can Veritas handle this? And will the D1000 drives work
> in an OPS environment?
>

Running an OPS environment is not to tough, it requires cluster volume manager(CVM), which is seperately licensed product for VM 3.0.x +. The CVM is a small addition to VM which allows you to create a shared volume, that all nodes in a cluster can read and write to at the same time. Oracle supplies the locking software, I think it is the UDLM package located in the patches directory on the Oracle Enterprise CD. And one note, if you are using VCS, I just got back from Veritas Cluster class and VCS 1.3 states in the manual that OPS is supported, but it is not supported yet!

>
>
> Finally, if/when we switch to OPS, I can't imagine why we would need
> Veritas to monitor the status of our database, since if one goes down the
> other parallel servers take over (right?). And if we are forced to switch
> to unix raw devices.. then is our $20,000 Veritas license useless?

No your license is not useless. But which license? VM or VCS( if using)? If your VM is 2.x from Sun then CVM is included, but is activated when used with Sun Cluster during installation. Sounds like you may have Veritas Cluster, and to switch to OPS would require Sun Cluster 2.2 or 3.0. But anyway OPS still needs on a cluster platform of some kind.

Email me directly if you want, I have lots of time with Sun & OPS clusters.

--
Remove the no spam from my address to respond.

Heath