Re: 10g RAC design options

Comments in-line.

Rodrick Brown wrote:
> Currently we are using 2 x Sun Fire 15K 8 CPU_at_1.2GHz 16GB of Memory under
> VCS 3.5 with Solaris 8, we run both nodes active-active and failover between
> both, each node has 4 Oracle instances, if all instances try to run on one
> node the performance is impacted severely, and this will probably always be
> the case so scaling up is no longer an option.

I am confused by what you have written. Are you, perhaps, confusing RAC with DataGuard? DataGuard has active-active but with RAC the nodes are either active or they don't exist.

Also with RAC it would be a horrible waste of money to build with CPU machines. The best possible value comes from 2 CPU nodes.

> In another 4-6 months this environment wont be able to support the future
> application requirements so RAC is starting to look very good at this point,
> I'm strongly looking to go with a 4 Node 4-way x86 server w/8GB of memory
> from either Sun or IBM, Sun is currently shipping Opterons which are 64bit
> but I'm not sure if Linux would be a better option is 64bit Linux ready for
> primetime? What is the status of Oracle 10g RAC on 64bit x86 Solaris?

Unless you have some reason to want to spend more money and get less performance you are, apparently without serious research, keying in on some of the slowest and most expensive options available. Why?

> Most of the staff is very Solaris savvy which is why Solaris looks like a
> much better fit, I do not want to go with a sparc based solution because of
> the high cost of Oracle licenses and slow CPU performance compared to x86.

Please explain what you mean by "Solaris savvy"? If they know UNIX they know UNIX. And yes there are minor differences between Solaris and HP/UX and AIX and Linux and FreeBSD but they are so insignificant that any competent (and I emphasize competent) staff should be able to pick up any other UNIX flavour with a week's training.

Choosing Solaris because it is what you know is like sticking with COBOL because it is what you know. I'd rethink this concept.

> Another concern; uptime have been almost 99.999% over the past 3+ years my
> current solution has been deployed, how are most people deploying RAC? Do
> you cluster between RAC using VCS? I've read that their can be certain
> situations where patching RAC would require every node being offline, in
> this environment this is not a suitable option.

Absolutely not. Assuming 10g we cluster RAC using ASM managed RAW. I can't imagine why anyone would pay Veritas for something provided by Oracle for free nor why anyone would choose to deal with two finger-pointing vendors when they could deal with only one.

Yes there are situations where you might need to bring down a cluster. But properly designed, and using Grid Control, that need never equate with a loss of service to your customers.

> I have been consulting with Oracle but I would just like to hear from real
> world situations.

Who in Oracle? The AE/SE teams are not necessarily the experts.

If you contact me off-line I can put you in touch with an expert on the subject who I know has been willing to help others for free.

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)