Re: Oracle 10g RAC crashes and VMware ESX Server

Chuck Whealton wrote:
> Everybody:
>
> I've searched the VMTN forums and found no solutions to this one (just
> another similar question with no resolution) and I found nothing of
> any use on Oracle's Metalink. I also looked at some of the postings
> in this newsgroup, but I saw nothing along the lines of what I'm doing
> and the problems I'm having. This posting is mainly a copy of a
> posting I made in the VMware Technology Network discussion groups.
>
> I'm running ESX 3.0 on a couple of BL20p G3 blades. The storage is on
> an EVA5000 disk array (3.025 firmware), using two separate fabrics.
> The shared storage was created on a vDisk and zeroed, connected to
> each VM with the proper support for shared storage (i.e. - virtual
> bus, separate controller, etc.). I have two Windows 2003 Server VMs,
> an internal VM network for the Oracle RAC interconnect with private IP
> addressing, as well as a standard public network. I'm on Oracle 10g
> (10.2.0.3.0).
>
> This problem ONLY happens with my RAC nodes so I'm 99% sure it's
> cluster related as I have no problems with standalone Oracle databases
> on VMs.
>
> My W2K3 virtual machines crash at random. I can't find anything useful
> in the vmware (vmkernel, hostd.log, etc.) logs, however, if I look at
> the vmware.log for one of the nodes, the crashes start off with a
> "vcpu-0| CPU reset| soft". That's it, and that's not enough. The
> Oracle alert logs have nothing of any use beyond the usual remaining
> node indicating that it's lost connection with a member.
>
> I've had similar problems with Oracle 9i RAC on virtual machines using
> ESX 2.5.x, though they never resulted in node restarts, just lost
> communications with instances going down. Once I put that
> configuration on physical hardware - I had no problems whatsoever. I
> can only assume that once I put this 10g configuration on physical
> hardware, these particular problems will vanish also (I hope!).
>
> Does ANYBODY have ANY ideas on what could cause (probable) Oracle
> clusterware problems on ESX Server? This isn't production, but it bugs
> the living heck out of me. It can't be pure coincidence that I've had
> problems on both 9i and 10g RAC on both ESX 2.5.x and 3.0.
>
> Thanks...
>
> Charles R. Whealton
> Charles Whealton @ pleasedontspam.com

What occurs to me is that your configuration is not one supported by Oracle and, unless this is for playing at home, not likely to have a happy ending.

That said ... have you run the 10g cluster verifications? What do they tell you?

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)
Puget Sound Oracle Users Group
www.psoug.org