Re: Oracle on Diskless machine?

In article <1993Aug12.232128.1718_at_cabezon.uucp>, davec_at_netmaster.lmc.com (Dave Clark) writes:
|>
|> I have a few questions, that may be answered in the Oracle DBA FAQ (if so please
|> forgive).
|>
|> 1) Does Oracle support NFS file systems? That is, can Oracle run on
|> a diskless (or dataless) unix system?

Oracle disks need to be local. The main reason for this is that NFS does not do synchronous writes. I am presuming by Oracle you mean the background processes which compose an oracle instance. It is perfectly okay to serve Oracle tools from an NFS server to a workstation; however the workstation needs to connect to the database via SQL*NET.

Oracle does have a product for HA-R/S 6000s. Two HA-R/S 6000 can be loosely coupled and share disks over NFS. Oracle's parallell server option for these machines takes advantage of their loosely coupled architecture. It is mandatory that raw devices be used for the data files in this setup.

|>
|> 2) If so, what are some of the tradeoffs of a "BIG-Fast" NFS file server and
|> a diskless workstation running Oracle, versus a mid-size system running
|> Oracle and serving disks, and additionally an mid-size NFS file server?
|> Assume all systems are protected by UPS.
|>
|> The reason I ask is that we are comparing price, performance, support and
|> licencing costs, and reliability of these two architectures, and I am looking
|> for data and/or opinions. Has anyone out there used this CPU server / File
|> Server approach? If so, what has your experience been (do you still use it)?
|>
|> Please respond to me by e-mail (davec_at_lmc.com), and I will summarize the
|> responses.
|>
|> Thanks,
|> Dave Clark
|> Network Engineer -- Logic Modeling Corp. -- davec_at_lmc.com
Received on Fri Aug 13 1993 - 16:32:52 CEST