Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

Just discovered a fabulous resource for installing and configuring Oracle databases on various OS platforms: ORACLE-BASE . Oracle 9i, 10g, 11g but also RAC on Linux, Microsoft, VMware, Xen, etc. Recommended!

After a boot disk crash, I wanted to make sure existing data disks were unaffected. We use Oracle ASM for all our bare metal database servers and in this case there wasn't a proper backup of the (development) database. ASM marks its disks as being part of an ASM disk group and checking the first block of a partition. This lets you verify that the data still exists. Upon reinstallation of the OS and ASM software, you can then reuse existing ASM disks and groups and restore the data. To verify the disks are still marked as ASM disk groups, check the first block of the partition: dd count=1 if=/dev/sdc1 | od -c sdc being our first data disk after local disks (sda) and the boot LUN (sdb). Note the text string on the third line in capital letters and the string " D G _ D A T A 1", naming the disk group. You can check the list of available partitions using ' cat /proc/parititons|less '.

There is a quick FAQ on Oracle VM , explaining the basics about Oracle new virtualization technology. For instance, basic OracleVM is free as anyone can download the binaries . Support is available on a per-socket basis, not per-core. There are also ready-made templates with Oracle Linux (OEL) 4 update 5 for both 32 bit and 64 bit VMs. You will manage VMs with Oracle VM Manager. Oracle supports their own database 10g and 11g inside OracleVM, as well as OEM, Siebel, Peoplesoft and E-business Suite. Support for Oracle RAC clusters will be available somewhere in 2008. Testing is in progress, but timing issues in RAC are very strict, so it must be thoroughly tested. The requirements for OracleVM as similar to Xen's requirements: a new/recent CPU with VTX virtualization extensions is required for running VMs with Windows. If you only run Linux, you can use older hardware as well (and a kernel supporting paravirtualization).

Kevin Closson points to a test Dell did using their hardware and an Oracle et-up usign RAC and one without RAC. The results are interesting! The tests are run using Dell's DVD Store Test Application using a PowerEdge 2950 cluster and one PowerEdge 6850 .

Oracle will support the Oracle software on Linux clusters comprised of RAC compatible technologies and supported software combinations. NOTE: The information in the given matrix applies to all Linux platforms (RHEL, SUSE, SLES, OEL) unless otherwise stated in the platform specific section. Source: Kevin Closson's Oracle Blog