Re: 10g RAC design options

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

I like both: opteron and linux but unfortunately too many issues has been reported on RAC for x86-64. in partivular have a look at the suse-oracle mailing list archive.

RAC for x86-64 doesn't seem ready for production and oracle is not providing a great support on that platform :(

We are still waiting 10.1.0.4 patchset!

-- 
Fabrizio Magni

fabrizio.magni_at_mycontinent.com

replace mycontinent with europe