Configuring an EMC Symmetrix with HP-UX 11.0

[Wayne Willess]

Hello to All,

We have just purchased an EMC Symmetrix and are at the configuration stage. We need to decide between EMC Hyper volumes and Meta volumes. I was hoping someone in the forms has had some experience with a Symmetrix attached to an HP system running HP-UX 11.0 could help.

We will be using the Symmetrix to house our 2 TB SAP/R3 system running Oracle along with other smaller R3 systems. If you have experience with ether configuration I would like to hear from you. Let me know what you liked and disliked about your configuration and what if anything you would have done different if you could start over.

I know this is very open ended but any insight you can give would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Wayne

[Animesh Chakraborty]

Hi,
We are using similar type of setup.
While configuring luns,remember that there is a limitation of total 255.So make bigger luns mybe 11.6 GB each.And ask emc that it should be continious else load a patch PHKL_24004.
Are you using fibre channel ?
I also suggest to have BCV devices.It works fine in case of restore.For that you need to sync and split bcv everyday.
If you have any problem we would love to help you.

Thanks
Animesh

[Stefan Farrelly]

EMC have their own docments on how to best configure an EMC for Oracle databases. I would think they have one for Sap also. Ask them for it.

Weve just setup our new EMC frames (fibre) for Oracle as;
16 GB striped LUNS (4 GB stripes over 4 EMC 80GB disks) and for the /oracle_log areas a 4 GB area (striped also at the EMC end) and with its cache weighted heavily towards writes (consequently the read performance on the /oracle_logs is poor, but writing is good). This conflicts slightly with a whitepaper from Oracle which says you should stripe at the front end as well as the back end (on HP-UX using lvstripe as well as on the EMC) but EMC werent too happy about this, saying it could conflict with their caching so we left off the HP-UX striping (unfortunately in my opinion). But with fibre the performance is still really good.

[Andre Da Silva Dias]

Hi!

We have recently started to use Metavolumes on our newer Symmetrix. We have a meta of 5 hypervolumes (8.6Gb), so on the host side we have LUNs of 43Gb.
We also stripe on the host, but for load balancing using the connections to the Symm (since we don't use EMC Powerpath). For example, if we have 2 HBA connected to the Symm, we stripe the file system with two stripes one for each port.

[Byron Myers · Accepted solution]

I use HV's and put archive, redo, and mirr logs on their own Symmetrix spindle. I keep those unused HV's on the spindles for "emergency use". If you take this route, then don't forget to identify the mirror HV's spindle, so that you don't use HV's from this mirror spindle. I would ensure that you don't accidentally put multiple instances' archive, redo's and mirr' logs on the same spindle. I know EMC says that this doesn't matter since your writing to cache, but it really does improve performance - especially during intensive SAP batch runs. I am not a fan of striping because it locks you into a configuration - you can't add disks to a striped LV without having to destroy and recreate the LV; This is the typical performance vs. maintainability debate.