Ocfs2 users - Feb 2009 - future of ocfs2

At the company where I'm working right now, I'm part of an architecture 
effort to come up with our standard design for RAC on Linux across the 
firm. There will be dozens or possibly hundreds of deployments globally 
using the design we settle on.

We're internally debating whether or not we should include OCFS2 in this 
design right now, and I'm curious if anyone has arguments one way or the 
other to share. Our standard design on Solaris does utilize a cluster 
filesystem and we would welcome a similar design, but there are some 
concerns about the readiness, stability and future of OCFS2.

OCFS2 is being considered for these four use cases:
- database binaries (vs local files or NFS)
- diag top (11g) or admin tree (10g) (vs local files or NFS)
- archived logs
- backups

Other files will be stored in ASM.

I have seen mention in blogs such as 
http://bigdaveroberts.wordpress.com/ of something called ASMFS in 11gR2 
and I'm wondering - will this feature (if included) have any impact on 
Oracle's commitment to OCFS2 development? Could Oracle conceivably 
develop a whole new cluster filesystem and put their full weight behind 
it as they did for ASM storage, leaving OCFS2 as a lower priority for 
new features and improvements? Has Oracle demonstrated significant 
commitment to OCFS2 development and support in the past, and is this a 
mature enough technology for wide-scale deployment?

Just looking for opinions. :)

Thanks,
Jeremy

-- 
Jeremy Schneider
Chicago, IL
http://www.ardentperf.com

I am puzzled as to why you have not just gone to git.kernel.org and  
seen the change logs in Linus' tree. If you did, you would actually  
see the work that is going on. And what you would see is that a lot of  
work is going on. Just during 2.6.29's merge window, we have added  
support for posix acls, security attributes, user/group quotas and  
metadata checksumming. In the next kernel we hope to add indexed  
directories among other features. The ocfs2 doc page maintains a list  
of the features that are being added in mainline.

Your qs is not new. I have heard people speculate about ocfs2's future  
for many years now. First it was ASM. Now something else. While I  
cannot comment specifically on the blog post, all I can say is that  
ocfs2's future is very bright. It is already being shipped by 2 of 3  
enterprise distros and almost all non-enterprise distros including  
Fedora. While we did start with a database focus, we have expanded our  
user base to well beyond that. And we do not plan on slowing down  
anytime soon.

Sunil Mushran

On Feb 5, 2009, at 4:28 PM, Jeremy Schneider <jeremy.schneider at
ardentperf.com
 > wrote:
> At the company where I'm working right now, I'm part of an  
> architecture
> effort to come up with our standard design for RAC on Linux across the
> firm. There will be dozens or possibly hundreds of deployments  
> globally
> using the design we settle on.
>
> We're internally debating whether or not we should include OCFS2 in  
> this
> design right now, and I'm curious if anyone has arguments one way or  
> the
> other to share. Our standard design on Solaris does utilize a cluster
> filesystem and we would welcome a similar design, but there are some
> concerns about the readiness, stability and future of OCFS2.
>
> OCFS2 is being considered for these four use cases:
> - database binaries (vs local files or NFS)
> - diag top (11g) or admin tree (10g) (vs local files or NFS)
> - archived logs
> - backups
>
> Other files will be stored in ASM.
>
> I have seen mention in blogs such as
> http://bigdaveroberts.wordpress.com/ of something called ASMFS in  
> 11gR2
> and I'm wondering - will this feature (if included) have any impact on
> Oracle's commitment to OCFS2 development? Could Oracle conceivably
> develop a whole new cluster filesystem and put their full weight  
> behind
> it as they did for ASM storage, leaving OCFS2 as a lower priority for
> new features and improvements? Has Oracle demonstrated significant
> commitment to OCFS2 development and support in the past, and is this a
> mature enough technology for wide-scale deployment?
>
> Just looking for opinions. :)
>
> Thanks,
> Jeremy
>
> -- 
> Jeremy Schneider
> Chicago, IL
> http://www.ardentperf.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ocfs2-users mailing list
> Ocfs2-users at oss.oracle.com
> http://oss.oracle.com/mailman/listinfo/ocfs2-users

On Thu, Feb 05, 2009 at 06:28:51PM -0600, Jeremy Schneider
wrote:
> We're internally debating whether or not we should include OCFS2 in
this
> design right now, and I'm curious if anyone has arguments one way or
the
> other to share. Our standard design on Solaris does utilize a cluster 
> filesystem and we would welcome a similar design, but there are some 
> concerns about the readiness, stability and future of OCFS2.
	Short answer: It's been ready for years, it's been stable for
years, and it has a bright future.
> OCFS2 is being considered for these four use cases:
> - database binaries (vs local files or NFS)
> - diag top (11g) or admin tree (10g) (vs local files or NFS)
> - archived logs
> - backups
	These are the most standard and basic of ocfs2 uses outside of
data files.  Almost all customers running ocfs2 are using it for most or
all of these files.
> I have seen mention in blogs such as 
> http://bigdaveroberts.wordpress.com/ of something called ASMFS in 11gR2 
> and I'm wondering - will this feature (if included) have any impact on 
> Oracle's commitment to OCFS2 development? Could Oracle conceivably 
> develop a whole new cluster filesystem and put their full weight behind 
> it as they did for ASM storage, leaving OCFS2 as a lower priority for 
> new features and improvements? Has Oracle demonstrated significant 
> commitment to OCFS2 development and support in the past, and is this a 
> mature enough technology for wide-scale deployment?
	Oracle continually works to improve the power and usability of
of its products.  Sometimes features overlap, but that doesn't mean they
must exclude each other.  For example, you are planning to use ASM
storage for datafiles, but a filesystem of some type (ocfs2, NFS,
whatever) for other files.  This works just fine.  Those of us who work
on ocfs2 are not stopping.
	Let's revisit your questions at the top.  First up is readiness.
ocfs2 1.2, the older of the two currently supported production releases,
was released in February 2006.  That's three years ago.  Customers have
been running it for the use cases you describe ever since.
	Next is stability.  Oracle does extensive testing on each
release of ocfs2 to provide the best stability we can.  The 1.2 release
ironed out most of its bugs long ago.  The new 1.4 release, released in
August 2008, provides some significant performance improvements and is
already being adopted by our customers.
	What about the future?  We just released the 1.4 version, and
we're not done yet.  As Sunil pointed out in his email, we have a number
of significant features landing in the mainline Linux kernel; this is
where we do the development of ocfs2.  These features will make their
way into ocfs2 1.4 or a future release as they become stable.
	I hope that covers Oracle's commitment to the development of
ocfs2.  For support, let's look at
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/ (you can go there for all sorts of
information about ocfs2):

-8<--------------------------------------------------------------------
SUPPORT

Oracle provides full support for the OCFS2 file system for Oracle's
Unbreakable Linux Network subscribers.

Oracle also extends support for the OCFS2 file system to Red Hat
Enterprise Linux users for use with Oracle's database product.

Novell provides full support for the OCFS2 file system to SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server users. 
->8--------------------------------------------------------------------

	I hope this answers your questions and helps you in making your
decision.

Joel

-- 

Life's Little Instruction Book #313

	"Never underestimate the power of love."

Joel Becker
Principal Software Developer
Oracle
E-mail: joel.becker at oracle.com
Phone: (650) 506-8127

Hi everyone;

I wnat to ask you a question about migration processes. I know that we can use
both fscat and backup/restore method for migrating data from ocfs to ocfs2.

I am in situation that i should wonder about a disaster solution that i have to
copy an ocfs2 volume to an ocfs volume.

Does fscat package can copy (fscp) an unmounted ocfs2 volume to an mounted ocfs
volume?

? have read at oss.oracle.com that it supports ext2,ext3,ocfs and ocfs2 umounted
file systems but i have asked this question long ago but i could not get a clear
answer. (except the answer " > No, the fscat tools can only read certain
unmounted file systems.
> They cannot write. You can use it to copy data from ocfs
> to ocfs2 on a box running the 2.6 kernel (sles9/10, el4/5). ")
Could anyone give a clear explanation about this stuff?


Thanx for your time
Mehmet Can ONAL

Unsure what the confusion is. The answer was correct. fscat can read
certain unmounted fs. The list is mentioned on the home page. ext2, ext3,
ocfs and ocfs2. It does not write to these file systems when they are
unmounted. It can write to any mounted file system.


Mehmet Can ?NAL wrote:
> Hi everyone;
>
> I wnat to ask you a question about migration processes. I know that we can
use both fscat and backup/restore method for migrating data from ocfs to ocfs2.
>
> I am in situation that i should wonder about a disaster solution that i
have to copy an ocfs2 volume to an ocfs volume.
>
> Does fscat package can copy (fscp) an unmounted ocfs2 volume to an mounted
ocfs volume?
>
> ? have read at oss.oracle.com that it supports ext2,ext3,ocfs and ocfs2
umounted file systems but i have asked this question long ago but i could not
get a clear answer. (except the answer " > No, the fscat tools can only
read certain unmounted file systems.
>   
>> They cannot write. You can use it to copy data from ocfs
>> to ocfs2 on a box running the 2.6 kernel (sles9/10, el4/5). ")
>>     
>
> Could anyone give a clear explanation about this stuff?
>
>
> Thanx for your time
> Mehmet Can ONAL 
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ocfs2-users mailing list
> Ocfs2-users at oss.oracle.com
> http://oss.oracle.com/mailman/listinfo/ocfs2-users
>