Re: Oracle RAC on Win vs. Oracle on Linux

On 02/22/2010 11:05 PM, Robert Freeman wrote: > Anyone want to jump in on their preferred platform for RAC?

Adding my opinion to the thread. I have supported 6 2 node 10.2.0.2 RAC SE clusters on Windows a few years ago, and here's what I didn't like (I agree that some of these are linked to my lack of understanding of Windows internals):

• Windows is much more of a black box than Linux IMO. I needed to download tools from sysinternals to understand what's happening under the bonnet
• It's not as straight forward to kill Oracle processes on the OS level. Oracle is implemented as one multithreaded binary on Windows
• The implementation I inherited used Microsoft's clustering software which doesn't like RAC at all. We had serious problems with ASM volumes. I agree that this isn't a Windows fault but it bugged us a lot
• The initial installation of Clusterware was done with a domain account. After the AD admins migrated users to a different domain and switched off the old AD PDCs the cluster wouldn't start. Lesson learned: install CRS and RDBMS as local administrator. Always
• I had big problems performing cluster maintenance: a hardware crash forced us to remove the 2nd node from one of the clusters and then I couldn't add in the new node. If memory serves me right then it had to do with the passwordless access to the remote registry which didn't work despite my and Oracle Support's best efforts; OUI addnode.bat failed repeatedly and we had to rebuild the whole cluster with considerable downtime
• you can't get one off patches for Windows (regardless of RAC or single instance)

As you may have guessed I am not a Windows person, and don't want to become one-I feel much more comfortable with OSs that allow you to see what's happening without having to add 50 or so odd counters to a MMC snap in which is absolutely rubbish in conveying the relevant information in shiny colored dashboards. Can you imaging dtrace for Windows?

Martin

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Martin Bach
OCM 10g
http://martincarstenbach.wordpress.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/martincarstenbach
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