Hardware Architecture Question

[TWBSupport]

Hi All -
I'm looking for any advice on how to set the following up. Literature, books or on hand experience... We have 2 rp2470 (HPUX 11)each with 2-18G hard drives. Attached to the 2 rp2470's are an additional 12- 73G drives. I want to set up the following:

1. Oracle 9i Enterprise Server

2. 3 - Prod DB's (different apps @ 10G.

3. 3 - Failover DB's for Prod DB's

4. 3 - QA DB's for Prod DB's

5. Aprox 400G as data storage for an additional application.

The last time I did something like this was on a SUN box 2 1/2 years ago & I'm a little fuzzy... :o)
Can I setup RAID 5 & still have what I want or does it have to be mirrored. (The 400G data storage does not have to be mirrored)

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[Mark Landin]

Well what do you want? Maximum performance? Then mirror. Or do you want to minimize hardware usage? Then do RAID-5.

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

OK, I'll make an attempt here, but be advised: it all depends on you and your goals.

You've got 2 rp2470 servers. Are you looking to have failover capability from one to the other (MC/ServiceGuard)? If that's the case, you'd have to split your 876 Gb of external disk between the two and you wouldn't have the space for a fully cloned SG cluster (because of the duplication of the 400GB data storage).

Are you intending to use one of the servers for for your QA environment? You could reserve 60 GB of your external storage for the QA machine (3 DB's of 10 each plus mirrors for each one). This would leave 800 GB for the production environment which I'm assumint contains the 3 Prod DB's (60 GB), the 3 Failover DB's (60 GB), and the 400 GB of data storage. That should fit comfortably.

The internal drives ought to contain the root volume and be mirrored, 18 GB gives you plenty of room for the O/S and the other drive can be the mirror. You'll need the HP product MirrorDisk/UX to do this as the internal drives have no RAID capability.

I'm assuming through all this, that your external storage (12 x 73GB drives) is some sort of RAID array. If that's true then the summary is: no matter how you split up the two servers, mirror (RAID 0/1) *all* the DB's, and use RAID 5 to give you some resiliency in your 400 GB data storage area.

Hope this helps (and I didn't babble too much),

Pete

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi,

What kind of storage do you have?. This involves understanding of

1. LVM
2. ServiceGuard
3. MirrorUX

Leaving Oracle aside.

You cannot setup RAID 5 on the system side. Mirroring and striping are mutually exclusive with LVM. The best you can do is Extent Based striping which is not very effective.

All the manuals are available at

docs.hp.com website. You may need to quite some reading if you haven't worked on HP's before. A training class or two will help you a lot.

-Sri

[TWBSupport]

Hi Pete -
Yes, I am looking for failover capability for all the production databases from server 1 to server 2.The dept that is using the 400G data storage does not want it backed up in any way. (Yeah, I know that's crazy talk) So I was going to subtract the 400G from the 876G. Which leaves me 476G to work with. If I split that then I have 238G for each 'separate' server. What is the recommended partition size for a setup like this? On a SUN architecture, I always went with 2G partitions. Does this sound sufficient? Thanks for the info.

[Pete Randall]

Hi Belynda,

Who/what recommends the 2GB partitions? Oracle?

In HP, we use LVM (Logical Volume Manager) to manage disks. You group physical disks, or LUNs in the case of an array, into Volume Groups, or VGs. These VGs are broken down into Logical Volumes, or LVOLs, which can be of any size desired. For instance, we're an Informix shop and Informix deals in 2GB disk spaces that they call chunks. We built one large Volume Group filled with 2 GB LVOLs (and their mirrors) to satisfy Informix. I'm guessing that's what you're asking.

Another thing to consider is how you're going to share this storage between the two servers. In our case we built a SAN using a Brocade switch to connect our production and development server to the array, and divided the array into 2 VGs - one for each server. In your case, you could make 3 VGs: one of 400GB for the data and two of 238GB for the DBs (and there mirrors).

It sounds to me like (as Sri mentioned) you've got some homework to do on LVM, Service Guard, and MirrorDisk. Here's some links to http://docs.hp.com to get you started:

LVM (under the Managing Disks and Files Chapter)
http://www.docs.hp.com/hpux/onlinedocs/B2355-90742/B2355-90742.html

ServiceGuard
http://www.docs.hp.com/hpux/ha/index.html#ServiceGuard

MirrorDisk and more LVM:
http://www.docs.hp.com/hpux/onlinedocs/B2355-90672/B2355-90672.html


I hope this helps some. You've got quite a road ahead of you. Good luck,

Pete

[TWBSupport]

Thanks for the help & direction. It should be fun. :o)

[Pete Randall]

You're very welcome - Enjoy!

Pete