migrate production RAC from pa-risc to itanium on HP-UX

[Vreriks Marcel]

Hello,

I have the following Problem Description:
We have to migrate with our production RAC from pa-risc to itanium both (HP-UX)
want to know or we can expect any problems

### PROBLEM STATEMENT ###
we use RAC (10.1.0.4) on a PA-RISC HP-UX 11.23 using MC/SG
but at the moment the servers are to small and we need more power (havier machines)
and for this we start a project to replace the servers
but one important precondition is:
At the moment it's a important production system but we expect that within 2 to 3 years it will because legacy
Normally when a system is or will become legacy you will say:don't take any risc don't touch it, don't change it and probably it will run as it run before.

but in our situation that's not possible because we need heavier machines
The easiest way would be replace the PA-RISC by a havier PA-RISC, but pa-risc can't by bought anymore
So we need an alternative, itanium with HP-UX 11.23 come the close to it because the OS stay the same: HP-UX 11.23

most af the software we use on PA-RISC is also already used by us on itanium HP-UX 11.23 (as there are servers for development and testing)
and because of this for most of our software we know that it works fine on itanium and could say: oke, the risc is minimal
there is 1 exception: RAC: which is only used on the mentioned PA-RISC production system and nowhere else in our company
so from our perspective we can't say that it (RAC) is of no risc, if we go from PA-RISC to itanium and that it work on itanium as it did on PA-RISC

So the question is:
For RAC: can we go without any risc from PA-RISC to itanium ?


Greetings Marcel Vreriks

[Frank de Vries]

We use RAC on a hpux Itanium 11.23,
and it works seemingly.

Obviously , you need to study the prerequisites from the manuals.
Configure your kernel properly , install
the to the appropriate patch levels and
then roll it out properly.
Ensure you test the failover/takeover before you accept them into production.

For me the greatest risk is not the RAC software on Itanium, but the way it has been implemented by the consultant(s).

[Jozef_Novak]

Hello Marcel,

one thing that you'll have to keep in mind when migrating Oracle from PA-RISC to Itanuim in general is that you will have to do a new installation of Oracle binaries since you are going to a different platform. You cannot simply migrate the actual binaries with OS tools like vgexport /vgimport because of binary incompatibility. Then, the actual database data can be migrated using the above mentioned approach.

My opinion is that potentially RAC should not have any caveats running on Itanium, since it is now a HP preferred platform.

Jozef

[Hein van den Heuvel]

How much resource does the application use versus the database? If the database is less than say 50%, then you should perhaps considering splitting of the database to a separate box. That will free up the resources needed to host the application for a few years longer. You would add a (small) cluster of (small) itanium servers just for the database, possibly no MC/SG, just Oracle RAC/clusterware. Maybe go ASM, and for sure go 11.31 on the (itanium) database server. The database OS would be invisible to the application as it is completely hidden by Oracle behind SQL*net.

fwiw,
Hein van den Heuvel
HvdH Performance Consulting

[Vreriks Marcel]

Thx for your input