Dell-Oracle-Linux: Anyone else run this...because its not working for us!

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Dell 2650
PERC 4/DC (Dual Channel) RAID Controller for *external* storage (on 2 servers) PERC 3/DC (Dual Channel) RAID Controller for *external* storage (on 2 other servers) PowerVault 220

Oracle EE 9205
Oracle Cluster Manager 9205 (oracm, version[ 9.2.0.5.0.51 ]) Oracle OCFS-Oracle Cluster FileSystem 1.0.13-PROD1 (on 2 servers) EXT3 (on 2 other servers)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 3 (Taroon) kernel 2.4.21-15 (resently upgraded at Dell request. Linux SCSI MegaRAID Driver, Version 2.10.9.0 - Release Date: 10/25/2004 - Products Supported: MegaRAID Controllers
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For the 4th time in 12 months our hardware has let us down and we are running on the a backup db server. Disk errors controller (module?) failure.

We have tick with Dell open. Today Dell Support tells us that this config is *now* not supported for Oracle (RAC?)!!!

My SA tells me that on some Dell forum he sees lots of pleading for help from those running Dell-PowerVault and PCI PERC RAID Controller for *external* storage and MegaRAID Driver. He says most please go unanswered.

We run this is a RAID 1 config and previous ran it in a RAID 5 config...Dell is telling us that only RAID 10 works for the hardware (for Oracle)!?

He is the really sad part.
One of our 2 Dell PowerVault 220's we bought over two years ago with PERC 3/DC Controller for *external* storage. We ran this for Oracle 817 on SuSE 7.3 (desktop version, pro?...not server) with the out of the box MegaRAID Driver from SuSE. Also, we ran "naked" drives...no raid at all. And guess what, not a single Disk, Controller, Driver failure I can remember.

Now that *same* hardware in the config described above; 9i-RHEL3-ETX3-MegaRAID Driver has failed us over and over. Between the two like hardware systems (one RAC, on NON-RAC) we have a probably 6 total failovers and many, many short crash outages.

Seems to me that this software and RAID just doesn't work.

Anyone have experience with this hardware?

Thanks,

Chris Marquez
Oracle DBA

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