Re: Oracle on AIX/Power5 LPARs

"Glenn S" <rgs2005_at_gmail.com> wrote in message news:pan.2005.10.23.15.15.04.754801_at_gmail.com...
> We're looking at migrating our Oracle environment to new servers
> and I'm intrigued by the prospect of using IBM Power5 hardware (P550)
> running AIX with our Oracle application server and database server
> installations running in AIX logical partitions (LPARs) on the same
> server.
>
> We'd have four or five LPARs with two database installations and
> two application server installations. If you are doing this, can
> you clone an LPAR to create a second copy of an Oracle database for
> testing purposes?
>
> Any information greatly appreciated.
>
> --Glenn

Glenn,

We are successfully running Oracle 8i/9i/10g databases on 2 Escala PL1650R servers with LPAR's - each LPAR having 2CPU's and between 2 and 8GB of memory. Dynamic allocation of CPU and memory is easy and works well. One important note : if you ever need to upgrade the total available amount of physical memory inside the box, you need to bring all the partitions down for about 1 hour ... This can not be done online yet. So make sure you put enough memory inside the box for future growth (important, since 1 hour of downtime can cost a lot more than 1GB of memory :-)).

About the "cloning" : I think you can do this with NIM, which is AIX 5L disk backup software. A quick Google search gives this : http://www-aix.gsi.de/~bio/DOCS/aix510bynim.html.

We are cloning Oracle databases from one LPAR to another (for refreshing of test data) but we use EMC's BCV technology for that (cloning of SAN metavolumes).

HTH
Matthias Hoys Received on Sun Oct 23 2005 - 17:09:47 CDT