Use VxVM base (11i) in building Oracle Filesystems (Stripes)

[Alzhy]

I know that with the base VxVM 3.5 - I could alredy do striping (Raid-0). I won't need DMP or other RAID protection since I will be protected by the RAID protection on the EVA and SecurePath takes care of my pathing/failovers. I am planning to standardise on VxVM (and some stripes) over LVM as it offers better striped volume performance than LVM and one could easily control where a particular volume (LVOL in LVM lingo) may belong to which LUN...


Any thoughts? A friend did some tests to show that on a rp7405 with 4 HBA's (dual SP) to an HSG80... 4-way stripes with VxVM beats LVM stripes by almost 40%... I will do some tests myself and test several VxVM tunables -- ie. stwidth, blockszie, vol_maxio... etc...

[Brian Bergstrand]

Supposedly, VxVM isn't the rising star it once was. Since HP acquired Compaq/Tru64 they have been working at integrating Tru64 technologies into UX; including some of the storage features. The general direction for preferred storage management seems to be LVM, with some Tru64 features added in the future. I would guess HP will always support VxVM, but I don't think it will be the recommended choice.

This is just conjecture from what I've read/heard, but it may be something to keep in mind.

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Nelson,

Sounds like you have all your ducks in a row by having the mirroring & pathing elements covered.
If you get a chance to verify that perf difference, please do let us know.

We use the full-blown VxVM 3.5 here for our DBs to get the alt pathing & let the RAID 5 on the arrays handles PV failures. We do like the ease of Admin of VxVM but suffer with the Ignite & MC/SG quirks of Veritas as I'm sure all do.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Alzhy]

Jeff/Brian.. thanks for the replies and notes..

I am fully aware of what things may be or comming. It is just that Veritas is a "safer" approach IMHO... and besides we are already using it on our Solaris platforms -- headware and tools/scripts can be migrated accross not to mention with VxVM 4.0 -- will come multi-platform support and the freedom! Deport on HP - mount on Solaris -- backup on Linux...!

I am glad though that there seems to be increasing awareness about the right (sized) tools available out there to manage storage.. On Solaris -- gone are the arm-twisting that used to exist that you cannot get away without VxVM... for certain applications, Solaris's built-in Disksuite (now called Solaris Volume Manager) will do just fine... sorry for the deviation..

I will post my results LVM stripes vs VxVM stripes soon...