Re: RAC Question

On 2006-02-21, DA Morgan <damorgan_at_psoug.org> wrote:
> ExecMan wrote:
>> Hi Everyone!
>>
>> I am trying to teach myself about RAC. I bought a couple of books, and
>> I have a few questions I hope someone who's knowlege in this area is
>> greater than mine can help:
>>
>> First, I want to set up 2 Red Hat 9.0 boxes. What would be the minimum
>> or suggested requirements for hardware? ie. Storage, Memory, CPU
>> Speed?
>>
>> Second, I've read in this book about RAW Devices and Cluster File
>> Systems. Can someone give my an 'explanation for dummies' on what
>> those mean?
>>
>> I fully understand what a partition is in the 'Windows' sense, but not
>> CFS or RAW in the Unix sense.........
>>
>> Appreciate all your time!
>>
>> John
>
> RAW simply put is the lack of a file system. You are writing to a raw
> disk partition. OCFS and OCFS2 are two versions of an open-source
> clustered file system that supports RAC's shared-everything
> architecture. Essentially ... there is no locking.
>
> If you are trying to do this yourself you can kludge something together
> using FireWire (instructions last time I checked at dizwell.com) but

        You don't need to futz with firewire. GigE switches are now pretty cheap as are the NIC's. If you are working with multiple machines, I would recommend setting up a 3rd one as the shared storage and making it an iscsi array.

        This way you could get experience with multiple buzzword type technolgies at once. You could also setup the iscsi array as just a simple nfs server.

> you won't have a RAC cluster supportable by Oracle nor will you have
> any option for adding a more nodes or doing many of the things I would
> consider essential for truly learning RAC. Where are you located
> geographically speaking?
        

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