RAC , Sun Cluster and EMC disks

I am interested in setting up a RAC ( Real Application Clusters) environment using SUN hardware and EMC disk subsystems.

Some issues

1. Is using Sun machines with EMC disks certified for RAC ? I do understand fromm Metalink that Oracle corp. only certifies only software required but the hardware is certified by the vendors. It would seem that sun should certify the usage of EMC with their systems but there probably is a conflict of interest here. Is anyone using RAC on SUN systems with EMC disks ?
2. We would like to use 3 nodes in the cluster. Again metalink says that only two nodes are supported RAC/Sun Cluster 3.0 environment. However there is a caveat in the following explanation given :

"Sun Cluster 3.0 supports up to eight cluster nodes. Sun plan to extend this to 64 nodes eventually. Sun Cluster v2.2 had a previous limit of four nodes. Real Application Clusters (RAC) is supported with Solaris 8 (v2.8) and Sun Cluster 3.0, though only two nodes are supported at this current stage. The limitation on SC 3.0/RAC is due to the implementation of SCSI 3 Persistent Group Reservation PGR in the storage subsystem. SC 3.0 uses PGR for quorum management for more than 2 nodes. SCSI 2 Reserve is used by SC 2.2 and 3.0 for 2 node clusters. SC 2.2 uses a terminal concentrator for greater than 2 nodes. Sun will support PGR in T3 storage in an update but Sun will not support PGR in earlier storage offerings (e.g., photons - A5200). EMC, however, does supports PGR and these third-party vendors are now responsible for certification against Sun Cluster. Sun Cluster 3.0 RAC support will be certified to 4 nodes when the T3 storage upgrade is released. Certification to 8 nodes will happen at a later date"

 The key line here is "EMC, however, does supports PGR and these third-party vendors are now responsible for certification against Sun Cluster". Does this mean then that we might be able to use a 3 node cluster when using EMC disks.?

Any insights or experiences would be appreciated.

Amit Received on Fri Jun 07 2002 - 14:18:43 CDT