Oracle Binaries on NAS

Ok, here's the environment. Our client outsources operations to the company I work for.... (major point)

We run PROD on four 4-node Veritas clusters attached to EMC Symmetrix SANs. The $ORACLE_HOMEs are on either local storage on the Sun servers (or SAN storage), which we have a 16gb mount point for the various flavors of Oracle. The QA environment is two 5-node clusters. We run 7.3.4, 8.1.x, and 9.2.x in the enterprise. It's a lot of work keeping patches up to snuff, but I like the fact that we can patch a home that's not being used, then fail the cluster to the patched node. Simple....

Now, our "client" thinks we can save disk space (and money) and administration headache by consolidating the Oracle binaries on a separate, single NAS device. Now for Oracle Client installs, I'm not too worried. But for running an instance, I have major concerns, one of which is the "loss of NAS" incident, which may cause all instances to crash. Secondly, if a patch is needed, we would have to shutdown all the instances for a given ORACLE_HOME. Third, they propose putting /var/opt/oracle on NAS also. This means that files like "oratab" and "listener.ora" would have to contain entries for all the databases. Also, we need to address issues with symbolic links for the oracle password file, the spfile, pfile, and listener log files, as well as the instance lk file (in the $ORACLE_HOME/dbs directory).

Quite frankly, I'm against the whole idea, but I want to present a good argument for keeping things as they are. But our client really thinks this is a "progressive move".

SLS... Received on Thu Mar 27 2003 - 06:22:02 CST