Oracle / NFS

[Eugene Klaus]

Hello to All,

My question is as follows:
If I mount a filesystem large enough to hold the installation of an oracle database including executables, could I run that database from that filesystem. This assumes that the NFS must be mounted prior to starting oracle.

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom Eugene,

Running the database binaries off NFS is probably possible, though you need to check with oracle if its supported.

Storing the tablespaces on NFS has long been against oracle recommendations. With advances in NAS technology, some people have been doing this successfully.

Oracle did not support this in the past but may now, you will need to check with them.

I don't recommend running any oracle database in a way that Oracle does not support.

SEP

[Ivan Ferreira]

I think that is not recommended (and maybe unsupported) for availability and performance issues.

Why do you want to do that?, oracle installation binaries does no change too much to be keep it on a NFS server, if you want fault tolerance, you can just copy the files.

[Steven E. Protter]

I think its a space issue.

I reiterate.

If oracle doesn't support it. Do not do it.

At least not for basic operation. If you ignore this advice, one day you'll call oracle for support and hear the famous words:

"I'm sorry, we don't support that configuration."

It sucks. I had to not tell Oracle that my systems in Chicago were created by Ignite system replication to avoid hearing those words.

This proposed setup is so basic to database operations, I'm not even sure it will work.

SEP

[Sivasingam Santhakumar]

We use Oracle and Sybase databases NFS mounted from NetApp filers. Binaries kept locally but DBs on the filers.

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

NetAPPs and the EMC^2 IP4700 (and followers) are a different beast - these setups were certified by oracle.

Plain NFS would of course be the same, and I'd kinda trust it more than EMC^2 implemention, but this is *not* certified, thus a no-no.

I have run oracle test setups both on a NetAPP filer and a AIX-based webserver without troubles, but never chose to put the binaries onto NFS too.

If You have have a very strong reason and *no* accountability for what You do, NFS will do fine, just take care to have a tight setup including NFS locking daemons everywhere.

Personal opinion:
NAS/NFS sucks big time performancewise,
You're out of chance for Oracle support, will very probably incur additional downtime.

Go fibrechannel, there's an array for any budget (I bought two used ones for $300, including reasonably fast disks) and there is not yet another big time point of failure.

[Eugene Klaus]

Thanks to you all. I sort of felt that this would be the feeling.
Economic restrictions are tight, hence the consideration.