SAP - Oracle RAC - Linux - VMware

[Former Member]

Hi,

we would like to install SAP on a virtual environment (VMware) on Linux RedHat platform.

For the database, Oracle RAC is certified with OCFS2 (1.6) only with Oracle Linux and not RedHat Linux 5.

Can we intstall Oracle RAC database on 2 nodes with Oracle Linux and OCFS2 and other SAP components on Redhat Linux 5 ?

Are there any issues with SAP matrix compatibility ?

Thank you!

Dan

[markus_doehr2]

> we would like to install SAP on a virtual environment (VMware) on Linux RedHat platform.

> For the database, Oracle RAC is certified with OCFS2 (1.6) only with Oracle Linux and not RedHat Linux 5.

Note 1173954 - Support of Oracle for VMWare

According to

Note 527843 - Oracle RAC support in the SAP environment

Linux (x86, x86_64, IA64, Power):
General Availability on Red Hat and SuSE Linux.
RAC 11.2.0.1/2:
    Oracle Clusterware 11.2.0.1/2 + OCFS2 1.4.x or
    Oracle Clusterware 11.2.0.1/2 + Network Appliance NFS or
    Oracle Clusterware 11.2.0.1/2 + EMC Celerra NFS

Markus

[Former Member]

Markus, thank you for your answers !

Related to this subject I have a couple of questions for which I didn't find answers:

1. I understand OCFS is supported on Linux but is this a good practice to use OCFS2 in a production environment ?

2. Can you install Oracle RAC 11.2 on linux directly without first installing 10g2 and upgrade to 11.2

Thank you !

Dan

[audunlea_hansen]

Hi!

Take a look at http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/ora?rid=/library/uuid/f0774cd8-03dd-2d10-0897-8ca1ffc388ec&quicklink=...

ASM are now supported. May a good idea to use ASM instead of OCFS2 (Oracle goes for ASM, not for OCFS2)

Also take a look at Note 1398634 and http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/d053aa41-75b6-2d10-95b5-9a961a5ae...

My own experience with SAP on VMware are botneck on I/O. We have not tried direct mount of SAN into VM, but a lot of variants access the storage trough the VM. I'm not thinking the I/O througput are good enough. Works at sandbox-installations, but not that good on production.

Regards

Audun

[Former Member]

Hi Audun,

Thank you for the links.

I can see the ASM support is new (2.2.2011)

On Note 527843 from 25.01.2011 - Oracle RAC support in the SAP environment

Using raw devices and ASM (Automatic Storage Management) is not supported in the SAP environment. In the case of ASM, there is an exception regarding the Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR) and the voting disks

and

on Note 1550133 - Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) from 2 Feb 2011 they support ASM but with restrictions:

ACFS is required for RAC installations with ASM

To use ASM now, you have to migrate your database to ASM manually

Some important functions of SAP BR*Tools like backup, restore, recovery, tablespace and datafile management are not supported at the moment

Support for tablespace and datafile management is planned for Q2/2011

Also ASM instance will introduce another layer in the system with its problems, failures and resources consumption. I see on the Oracle Metalink alot of problems related to ASM. From the marketin point of view is ok, let's oracle do everything but I think if you will keep it simple it will be better.

I didn't figure out if you can directly install Oracle 11.2.0.2, they say "Allows direct SAP system installations with Oracle 11.2"

We have a vBlock hardware with flash disks as FAST Cache so I believe with 1TB of cache IO will not be a problem.

Thank you!

Dan

[Former Member]

Hi Dan

I'm also studying to mount a vBlock, but I can't find almost any information or user's comments.

Do you think it's a good idea to use vBlock? Do you use it in a BI environment? Any performance issues?

I would really appreciate if you answer these question or you can send me some link to vblock documentation.

Thanks in advance

Regards

[Former Member]

Regarding performance of Oracle RAC on VMware, I suggest to read the blog from VMware Performance Engineering:

http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2010/12/oracle-rac-performance-on-vsphere-41.html