Oracle RAC on OL 6.1

From: Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen_at_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 01:30:51 +0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <pan.2011.11.23.01.30.50_at_gmail.com>



I know that RAC and Oracle 13 are not yet supported on OL 6.x, but the installation goes without a hitch. The only additional thing that needs to be installed is the compatibility version of the libcap library:

[oracle_at_rac1 ~]$ rpm -qa|grep compat-libcap
compat-libcap1-1.10-1.i686
[oracle_at_rac1 ~]$

Of course, the installer must be invoked with -IGNORESYSPREREQS and cluvy at the end of the installation will fail because "this system doesn't satisfy the requirements", but it will work without a hitch.

[oracle_at_rac1 ~]$ uname -a

Linux rac1 2.6.32-100.34.1.el6uek.i686 #1 SMP Wed May 25 17:28:36 EDT 2011 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
[oracle_at_rac1 ~]$ cat /etc/oracle-release
Oracle Linux Server release 6.1
[oracle_at_rac1 ~]$

The installation finished without a hitch:
[oracle_at_rac1 ~]$ crsctl stat res -l

NAME=ora.LISTENER.lsnr
TYPE=ora.listener.type
CARDINALITY_ID=rac1
DEGREE_ID=1
TARGET=ONLINE
STATE=ONLINE on rac1

NAME=ora.LISTENER_SCAN1.lsnr
TYPE=ora.scan_listener.type
CARDINALITY_ID=1
DEGREE_ID=1
TARGET=ONLINE
STATE=ONLINE on rac1

NAME=ora.asm
TYPE=ora.asm.type
CARDINALITY_ID=rac1
DEGREE_ID=1
TARGET=OFFLINE
STATE=OFFLINE NAME=ora.cvu
TYPE=ora.cvu.type
CARDINALITY_ID=1
DEGREE_ID=1
TARGET=ONLINE
STATE=ONLINE on rac1

NAME=ora.gsd
TYPE=ora.gsd.type
CARDINALITY_ID=rac1
DEGREE_ID=1
TARGET=OFFLINE
STATE=OFFLINE NAME=ora.net1.network
TYPE=ora.network.type
CARDINALITY_ID=rac1
DEGREE_ID=1
TARGET=ONLINE
STATE=ONLINE on rac1

NAME=ora.oc4j
TYPE=ora.oc4j.type
CARDINALITY_ID=1
DEGREE_ID=1
TARGET=ONLINE
STATE=ONLINE on rac1

NAME=ora.ons
TYPE=ora.ons.type
CARDINALITY_ID=rac1
DEGREE_ID=1
TARGET=ONLINE
STATE=ONLINE on rac1

NAME=ora.rac.db
TYPE=ora.database.type
CARDINALITY_ID=1
DEGREE_ID=1
TARGET=ONLINE
STATE=ONLINE on rac1

NAME=ora.rac1.vip
TYPE=ora.cluster_vip_net1.type
CARDINALITY_ID=1
DEGREE_ID=1
TARGET=ONLINE
STATE=ONLINE on rac1

NAME=ora.scan1.vip
TYPE=ora.scan_vip.type
CARDINALITY_ID=1
DEGREE_ID=1
TARGET=ONLINE
STATE=ONLINE on rac1

[oracle_at_rac1 ~]$ srvctl status database -d rac
Instance rac1 is running on node rac1

[oracle_at_rac1 ~]$ sqlplus scott/tiger

SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.3.0 Production on Tue Nov 22 20:24:02 2011

Copyright (c) 1982, 2011, Oracle. All rights reserved.

Connected to:
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.3.0 - Production With the Partitioning, Real Application Clusters, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options

SQL> Oracle will probably not support this, but it is worth doing. The commands like iotop or atop with "-D" option now work and will show you the right results. The "perf top" command still doesn't work properly, it doesn't show me anything on OL 6.1
This version of RAC is installed using OCFS2. I have also verified the ASM install, which works flawlessly but my machine is too small. The ASM version was so slow that it was useless. Raw devices on OL 6.1 are created the same way as on RH 5.7: using /etc/udev/rules.d/60-raw.rules. The unintended consequence was that the protection of /dev/null was changed to 0660 but once I fixed that by putting the corresponding line in the 60-raw.rules, everything worked well. My only objection to OL 6.1 is the fact that "perf top" doesn't work. I am not on ULN, maybe there is a patch for that. The fact that Red Hat is disabling OCFS2 in their kernels is sufficient for me to recommend OL instead of RH for Oracle servers. The fact that OL 6.1 support comes with XFS, according to Mathias Hoys, is an additional plus. OL 6.1 is a viable alternative to Red Hat. I was even able to get RAC working on Fedora Core 15, with the compatibility rpm mentioned above. Unfortunately, Fedora doesn't support either raw devices or ASMLib, ASM is not possible. This was, of course, just a test, nobody in the right mind would install RAC in the office. It does, however, show one thing: RAC is now a decently polished product which is easy to install. Installing 10g RAC required a lot of experience and nerves of steel. It would normally fail if anything was wrong. With 11g, it is getting hard to have an unsuccessful installation, even if the OS is totally wrong, like FC 15 is. RAC has matured.

-- 
http://mgogala.byethost5.com
Received on Tue Nov 22 2011 - 19:30:51 CST

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