Re: ASM for single-instance 11g db server?

"Mladen Gogala" <gogala.mladen_at_gmail.com> wrote in message news:pan.2011.04.04.13.07.52_at_gmail.com...
> On Mon, 04 Apr 2011 01:53:01 -0700, mhoys wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> Is ASM actually recommended for a single-instance (non-RAC) Oracle 11g
>> installation on Linux, when the storage redundancy is managed by a SAN?
>> Is there a performance benefit when using ASM instead of ext3 or even
>> the newer ext4 filesystems?
>> Any good white papers out there?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Matthias
>
> Mathias, ASM is usually used with RAC. That's about it. ASM is a non-
> standard storage method which doesn't allow things like ls, tar,cpio, cp,
> gzip or other Windows utilities. ASM requires a separate Oracle instance
> and cannot be used by anything but Oracle. ASM was invented to prevent
> the competition from using Oracle technology for competing products. As
> for ext[2,3,4] family of file systems, it's sub-standard in quality and I
> would stay away from it, if at all possible. JFS will provide better
> performance than Ext3 and is less prone to fragmentation.
> Ext4 is an extent based FS which was released without defragmenter. As a
> matter of fact, Ext4 still has no defragmenter. There is a general
> purpose file system defragmenter called "shake", but it's not what I
> expected from ext4.
> Long story short, stay away from ASM, unless your database is RAC, in
> which case it's pretty much the only reasonable choice.
>
>
>
> --
> http://mgogala.byethost5.com

Hello Mladen,

Thanks for the feedback. Is JFS for Linux actually supported by Oracle? And if you talk about better performance, can you put a figure on that? 10%? 30%? More? We are currently using Red Hat 4 with ext3 and async i/o for our 10g instances. We never had any filesystem problems (running steady for almost 5 years), but we are a small shop. I'm currently looking at Oracle Linux 6, I noticed that XFS is included, could that provide a better performance than ext4? Maybe I should do some performance tests myself :-)

Matthias Received on Mon Apr 04 2011 - 16:22:55 CDT