Oracle 10g with HPUX 11i filesystem recommend

[Chris Howard]

For datafiles on a VA7400 array:

Raw or filesystem?
HFS or VxFS?

Not RAC, nothing fancy just an OLTP Oracle database, about 200GB of data.

[Pete Randall]

Raw or filesystem? Filesystem
HFS or VxFS? VxFS


Pete

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Raw or filesystem? It depends. For pure performance, raw wins although cooked i/o can be close. If you choose raw, Oracle (RMAN) now becomes solely responible for backup and restores (well, you could use dd but that would be dumb for a production system). You also have to take great care that these raw devices are never accidently used for other purposes so document raw device usage very, very well.

Vxfs or hfs? Always vxfs.

[Hein van den Heuvel]

KISS: filesystem + VxFS

Before you decide on filesystems and such, please CONSIDER Oracle ASM, as that might change to approach completely.

I'm not saying not recommending you should actually choose to use it, but you should make a concious decision about it.
I'm a little sceptical towards ASM but am hearing more and more positive feedback.

What BACKUP method are you planning to use?
If it is Rman, then raw becomes more interesting

How critical is performance? CPU to spare? The more critical, and the less resources to spare the more interestinf RAW (or ASM) becomes.

What are the HPUX and Oracle skills in house? Comfortable slicing and dicing LUNs and Volumne groups? Then RAW becomes more interesting again.

Hope this helps some,
Hein van den Heuvel (at gmail dot com)
HvdH Performance Consulting

[Don Mallory]

Watch your queuedepth and queue full threshold values on the array.

In a performance analysis review with HP and Oracle, mincache=direct on the filesystems was heavily tested and it was determined that OS caching was actually BETTER than Oracle's caching algorithms. (v11.11)

We've also separated off each mount point as it's own volume group and associated LUN using LUNs no greater that 100GB. (/u01 is vg01, which has it's own LUN.) It's a pain to manage, but HP and Oracle said we should do it and it did make a difference afterwards...

If you aren't using SecurePath or some other multipathing software, enusre that you are balancing your primary disk paths between the array controllers. (e.g. RG2 uses controller 2 as the primary path)

[Tor-Arne Nostdal]

Ref.
VxFS you should also consider to have the licensed sw 'OnlineJFS' so you can extend the filesystem online !!!
(part of some HP-UX licenses, otherwise separate product)

Mount options is also important.
Consider these for your system.

FS for Oracle sw/log files:
============================
rw,nodatainlog,delaylog,largefiles

FS for Oracle DB datafiles:
===========================
rw,nodatainlog,delaylog,largefiles,mincache=direct,convosync=direct

/Tor-Arne

[Court Campbell]

I am not a fan of the VA7400. I used one for 3 years and my only advice is that you take it out of autoraid. If it's not setup autoraid then you are good. It's been a while, but the VA also has the ability to present luns to certain hosts. You will need to look that up, if you are interested. You can do it in command view.