Re: ASM on Linux with SAN : yes or no ?

Matthias Hoys wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm currently preparing the migration of 2 Oracle 8i and 9i databases
> currently running on LPAR's with AIX 5.2 (IBM PowerPC) to Oracle 10g R2 on
> RHEL AS/ES 4.0 with Intel or AMD hardware. We are moving away from AIX and
> towards Linux and cheaper hardware to reduce hardware and maintenance costs
> and because one of our software vendors doesn't support AIX anymore.
> Now my question is, since the new server(s) will be connected to a SAN
> (probably IBM or EMC), is it still useful to use ASM as storage for the
> database files ? The sysadmin guys are against using a Linux LVM, since they
> think it is not mature enough. So the only other option would be to use
> "standard" Linux ext3 filesystems for the database files.
> Is anyone using ASM on Linux production systems ? Any pro/contras ? What
> about the combination ASM/SAN (double striping) ? ASM overhead versus
> filesystem buffer cache overhead ? What would be the recommended database
> block size when using ASM on Linux ?

we are using ASM on RHEL 3 on Intel (I'd push to get your hardware people to buy opteron based machines myself). You don't need to do the double striping if you define your disk groups with external redundancy, which makes sense on a SAN. I'd probably not have chosen ASM myself - decision made before I got here - but it works well enough.

You will want to make sure that you have good driver support for the FC adapters and so on. Received on Thu Aug 24 2006 - 04:51:19 CDT