Re: The cheapest hardware for real RAC

DA Morgan wrote:
> BTW: Can you demonstrate fencing with it? Can you get a node to shoot
> itself in the head? Does it connection load balance?

I no longer have it (my kids have taken over that area of our basement), as I built it to ensure I could build a "real" one we had coming up at work, so the actual testing I did apart from functionally ensuring it worked was admittedly minimal.

Out of your three questions, I only tested the load balancing out of curiosity, and it did it quite well. I wrote a threaded app that spawned 1000 connections and did a select from v$instance, and then printed out the instance to which that session was connected. It was actually pretty remarkable in terms of how well it did this, considering the cheesy hardware (two fast PC's and one doorstop PC).

There is no doubt it is an unsupported configuration, and definitely not a "real RAC" (I laugh when I think about trying to run it in any environment of importance). I still say, however, that it is a completely legitimate way to teach yourself RAC when you do not have the hardware but want to be prepared when you do. Based on my "training", I ended up building a four node four way "real" RAC on EMC storage. I would have been up to my eyeballs in frustration had I not previously built and tested for a month at home. I beat that thing to death unplugging interconnects, unplugging computers, kill -9ing pmon's, gracefully removing nodes, etc. My goal for adding the third node was to ensure that I could, in fact, do it.

As I originally posted, I just wanted everyone to be aware, that for a *test* system, a third node can be done.

Regards,

Steve Received on Fri Jul 07 2006 - 18:10:32 CDT