Ardent Performance Computing
Oracle
ASM Mirroring – No Hot Spare Disk
Some time ago, we installed Oracle on a Sun box with 48 local 1TB disks (spread across six controllers). I explained to the storage and system teams that we would use ASM as the volume manager – and as such, it would take care of mirroring. One storage admin asked me which disk was the … Continue reading
Five Reasons to do RAC Attack at Collaborate
Last week Dan broke the news that we’re bringing RAC Attack back to Collaborate! We’ve run this workshop several times now: it’s gotten better every time and we’ve always received overwhelmingly positive feedback. This is going to be a great workshop in Orlando that you don’t want to miss! A Short History We first ran … Continue reading
ASM Negative Free Space
In the last post I showed mathematically how ASM calculates the free usable space that it displays. However one of the first questions I received after presenting that internally was from someone concerned about all of the unusable space being saved just in case we lose a disk. (In my worked example it was 1/6 … Continue reading
ASM Space Calculations and Hot Spares
This is quick and dirty. I hope to get a more polished write-up of what it means and how it works, but since I’m so busy right now I don’t know if I’ll get to it soon. In the meantime someone just might find this useful or informative so I’m just going to put it … Continue reading
Future of OCFS2
At the company where I’m working right now, I’m part of an architecture effort to come up with our standard design for RAC on Linux across the firm. There will be dozens or possibly hundreds of deployments globally using the design we settle on. We’re internally debating whether or not we should include OCFS2 in … Continue reading
Oracle ASM Stripe Size
Right now I’m working on some internal documentation and referencing Oracle 11g’s Storage Administrators Guide (ASM manual). And I think there’s a bit of a contradiction here about the stripe size. ASM uses a variable “data extent” size when allocating space for files (like any sane filesystem) – the first 20000 data extents are equal … Continue reading
Parsing LISTENER.ORA with awk and sed
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the US! And happy belated thanksgiving to everyone in Canada since you celebrated back at the beginning of October. :) I’ve been doing a lot of scripting work lately. Although I can’t write about everything I’m doing, I would like to post a pattern that I thought could be useful … Continue reading
Oracle Fully Automated Install and Patch
Before I started consulting, I was an Oracle engineer in a very large software development organization. The company had a number of major products and the one I worked with was used by hospitals and radiology offices world-wide. (These guys are one of the biggest companies worldwide in the field.) Our product included the hardware … Continue reading
ASMLIB Performance vs Udev
Is asmlib obsolete on a modern Linux system? I’m still undecided but starting to lean toward “yes”. Everybody knows that asmlib was very useful when it was first introduced with Oracle 10.1 to simplify a host of issues on Linux: direct async device access without raw devices, file permissions & ownership without custom code, and … Continue reading
Collaborate Wrapup, RAC 11g/VMware Lab
So Collaborate is over and I’m back in Chicago… home sweet home. I thoroughly enjoyed the week in Denver, in spite of the snow! Thursday, the last day, was especially fun. First was a panel debate “To RAC or Not To RAC: What’s Best for HA.” Dan Norris invited me to participate in this panel … Continue reading
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contact: schneider @ ardentperf.com
Ardent Performance Computing 
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