Re: intel clusters in a box

Actually, the Dell/EMC:Clariion)/RedHat Oracle-certified 9i RAC cluster platform has been around for a while. We've had such a critter for almost two years. Its OK now, but there were growing pains. Linux is not Solaris, or AIX, or ... In hindsight, its humorous. At the time, it was exasperating.

It didn't show up in testing (albeit, not at quite full functionality and load concurrently), but shortly after we went production, we started having some very serious issues - instance crashes, 10,000 session/connection failures per hour, nodes losing their LUNs (very messy), sudden and mysterious node crashes, even a few memorable whole-cluster crashes. It turned out to be a buggy driver intermittently corrupting memory and trashing whatever happened to be there. It happened on either or both nodes, at random, sometimes lying dormant for a week or two everywhere. This lasted for most of Q1 2004. Oracle support had never heard of their (then at least) oft-espoused "one stop" support for Oracle and Linux (and, especially, for RAC on Linux). I sent the URL (www.oracle.com/something_or_other... don't have it handy right now though.) for the (then) year+ old press release to them before they even knew that they (supposedly) supported the Linux OS at all. They then suggested that we call RedHat or Dell. We did - and some weeks later *finally* got a diagnosis and a fixed driver (2nd attempt).

The next call to Oracle support, on an unrelated and relatively minor issue, lead to a preliminary diagnosis that we had a "tainted kernel". We would have to restore everything to its original certified and thoroughly crash-prone state to be supported. We refused and closed the TAR.

Eventually though, they forgave us.

-Don Granaman
OraSaurus

• Original Message ----- From: "Ray Stell" <stellr_at_cns.vt.edu> To: "oracle-l" <oracle-l_at_freelists.org> Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2005 1:52 PM Subject: Re: intel clusters in a box

>
>
> No bites on this. I emailed a dell rep. He suggested I start reading
> at www.dell.com/oracle
>
> Seems redhat/dell/emc are working together to produce such offerings.
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 11:14:36AM -0500, Ray Stell wrote:
> >
> > I've been building my own intel/linux clusters for testing. I'm
> > wondering if you have tested any commerical offerings for the whole 9
> > yards; processers, FC, and storage.
> >
> >
> >
> > http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_252.html
> >
> > "More commonly, however, you hear that the expression comes from the
> > capacity of ready-mix concrete trucks. Concrete trucks supposedly
> > contain nine cubic yards when fully loaded."
> ===============================================================
> Ray Stell stellr_at_vt.edu (540) 231-4109 28^D
> --
> http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
>

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