zfs discuss - Dec 2007 - Does Oracle support ZFS as a file system with Oracle RAC?

Does anyone know this?

David Runyon
Disk Sales Specialist

Sun Microsystems, Inc.
4040 Palm Drive
Santa Clara, CA 95054 US
Mobile 925 323-1211
Email David.Runyon at Sun.COM




Russ Lai wrote:
> Dave;
> Does ZFS support Oracle RAC?

David Runyon wrote:
> Does anyone know this?
> 
> David Runyon
> Disk Sales Specialist
> 
> Sun Microsystems, Inc.
> 4040 Palm Drive
> Santa Clara, CA 95054 US
> Mobile 925 323-1211
> Email David.Runyon at Sun.COM
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Russ Lai wrote:
>> Dave;
>> Does ZFS support Oracle RAC?
> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
metalink doc 403202.1 appears to support this config, but to me reads a 
little unclear.


{
Applies to:
Oracle Server - Enterprise Edition - Version: 9.2.0.5 to 10.2.0.3
Solaris Operating System (SPARC 64-bit)
Goal
Is the Zeta File System (ZFS) of Solaris 10 certified/supported by 
ORACLE for:
- Database
- RAC

Solution
Oracle certifies and support the RDBMS on the whole OS for non-RAC 
installations. However if there is an exception, this should appear on 
the Release Notes, or in the OS Oracle specific documentation manual.

As you are not specific to cluster file systems for RAC installations, 
usually there is no problem on install Oracle on the file systems 
provided by OS vendor.But if any underlying OS error is found then it 
should be handled by the OS vendor.

Over the past few years Oracle has worked with all the leading system 
and storage vendors to validate their specialized storage products, 
under the Oracle Storage Compatibility Program (OSCP), to ensure these 
products were compatible for use with the Oracle database. Under the 
OSCP, Oracle and its partners worked together to validate specialized 
storage technology including NFS file servers, remote mirroring, and 
snapshot products.

At this time Oracle believes that these three specialized storage 
technologies are well understood by the customers, are very mature, and 
the Oracle technology requirements are well know. As of January, 2007, 
Oracle will no longer validate these products.

On a related note, many Oracle customers have embraced the concept of 
the resilient low-cost storage grid defined by Oracle''s Resilient 
Low-Cost Storage Initiative (leveraging the Oracle Database 10g 
Automatic Storage Management (ASM) feature to make low-cost, modular 
storage arrays resilient), and many storage vendors continue to 
introduce new, low-cost, modular arrays for an Oracle storage grid 
environment. As of January, 2007, the Resilient Low-Cost Storage 
Initiative is discontinued.

For more information on the same please refer to Oracle Storage Program 
Change Notice

}

On Dec 18, 2007 11:01 AM, David Runyon <David.Runyon at sun.com>
wrote:
> Does anyone know this?
There are multiple file system usages involved in Oracle RAC:

1) Oracle Home - This is where the oracle software lives.  This can be
   on a file system shared among all nodes or a per-host file system.
   ZFS should work fine in the per-host configuration, but I don''t
   know about an official support statement.  This is likely not very
   important because of...
2) Database files - I''ll lump redo logs, etc. in with this.  In Oracle
   RAC these must live on a shared-rw (e.g. clustered VxFS, NFS) file
   system.  ZFS does not do this.

If you drink the Oracle kool-aid and are using 10g or later the
database files will go into ASM, which seems to share a number of
characteristics with (but is largely complementary to) ZFS.  That is,
it spreads writes among all allocated disks, provides redundancy
without an underlying volume manager or hardware RAID, is transaction
safe, etc.  I am pretty sure that ASM also supports per-block
checksums, space efficient snapshots, block level incremental backups,
etc.  Although ASM is a relatively new technology, I think it has many
more hours of runtime and likely more space in production use than
ZFS.

I think that ZFS holds a lot of promise for shared-nothing database
clusters, such as is being done by Greenplumb with their extended
variant of Postgres.

-- 
Mike Gerdts
http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/

On Dec 18, 2007, at 12:23, Mike Gerdts wrote:
> 2) Database files - I''ll lump redo logs, etc. in with this.  In
Oracle
>    RAC these must live on a shared-rw (e.g. clustered VxFS, NFS) file
>    system.  ZFS does not do this.
If you can use NFS, can''t you put things on ZFS and then export?

On 12/19/07, David Magda <dmagda at ee.ryerson.ca>
wrote:
>
> On Dec 18, 2007, at 12:23, Mike Gerdts wrote:
>
> > 2) Database files - I''ll lump redo logs, etc. in with this. 
In Oracle
> >    RAC these must live on a shared-rw (e.g. clustered VxFS, NFS) file
> >    system.  ZFS does not do this.
>
> If you can use NFS, can''t you put things on ZFS and then export?
Is it a good idea to put a oracle database on the other end of a NFS
mount ? (performance wise)

Yes if the underlying NFS share FS is ZFS rather than VxFS... The point
mentioned pertains to ZFS'' inability to have the pool enabled from two
different source nodes.
-----Original Message-----
From: zfs-discuss-bounces at opensolaris.org
[mailto:zfs-discuss-bounces at opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of David Magda
Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 9:46 PM
To: Mike Gerdts
Cc: ZFS Discussions
Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] Does Oracle support ZFS as a file system with
Oracle RAC?


On Dec 18, 2007, at 12:23, Mike Gerdts wrote:
> 2) Database files - I''ll lump redo logs, etc. in with this.  In
Oracle
>    RAC these must live on a shared-rw (e.g. clustered VxFS, NFS) file
>    system.  ZFS does not do this.
If you can use NFS, can''t you put things on ZFS and then export?
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Louwtjie Burger wrote:
> On 12/19/07, David Magda <dmagda at ee.ryerson.ca> wrote:
>   
>> On Dec 18, 2007, at 12:23, Mike Gerdts wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> 2) Database files - I''ll lump redo logs, etc. in with
this.  In Oracle
>>>    RAC these must live on a shared-rw (e.g. clustered VxFS, NFS)
file
>>>    system.  ZFS does not do this.
>>>       
>> If you can use NFS, can''t you put things on ZFS and then
export?
>>     
>
> Is it a good idea to put a oracle database on the other end of a NFS
> mount ? (performance wise)
Depends on the characteristics of your network and what amount of 
performance you need. (As with most things it depends...)