Installing Oracle with VxFS or HFS????

[Girish_17]

Hi Friends,

I am about to do Oracle 10g installation on our production server in next coming weeks. But i had came across one discussion like why i should go for VxFS filesystem and why not use the existing HFS filesystems.
Since oracle handles the database on a RAW filesystem and only it's binaries resides on a filessystem, is it really worth to think of VxFS?
Does that affect the performance of Oracle? or any other related issues that you can throw light on like why it should be an VxFS filesystem and not HFS.
Does that really matter for Oracle!!

Your comments are highly valuable and appreciated.

BTW, we have servers running with 11.23v2 HPUX and rx2600 Hardware with 1 GB of RAM.
IF you need any more info please let me know.
This are not Production servers but performance matters a lot for us.

Thanks and regards,
Girish

[Steven E. Protter]

If you go filesystem go vxfs.

its superior, more relliable and can be tuned to eliminate teh double buffer of the default fs and Oracle's own buffer.

A. Clay Stephenson has done some research on raw versus cooked filesystems and oracle (vxfs i assume) and found with 11i v1 little difference in performance. Raw was a tiny bit faster.

Your main problem here is you don't have enough RAM for the OS and oracle 10g. Oracle is recommending 4 GB for HP-UX and 10g.

Your current setup will run slowly if at all, swap badly and not be able to handle many users if any.

SEP

[Eric Antunes]

Hi,

Here are 2 good threads about this subject:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=193104

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=753721

Best Regards,

Eric Antunes

[Nguyen Anh Tien]

THIS IS EXTRACT FROM "HP-UX SYSTEM AND NETWORK ADMINISTRATOR I" BOOK.
I, High-Performance File System (HFS)
HFS represents HP-UXâ s standard implementation of the UNIX File System (UFS). HFS file
systems reside on mass storage devices, usually hard disk drives. Prior to HP-UX Release
10.01 this was HPâ s only disk-based file system. HPâ s long term strategy is for JFS to become
the default and for HFS to continue to exist for compatibility.
II,Journaled File Systems (JFS)
The HP-UX Journaled File System, also known as Veritas File System (VxFS), is an
extent-based journaling file system which offers fast file system recovery and on-line features
such as on-line backup, on-line resizing and on-line reorganization. An intent log contains

There are two JFS products, base and online. The base JFS file system has the fast recovery
feature and is included in all 10.01 and later systems. Online JFS, also referred to as
Advanced VxFS is an optional product that adds extensions to JFS. It offers these additional
capabilities:
â ¢ online defragmentation and reorganization
â ¢ online expansion and contraction of file system size
â ¢ online backup

SO I HIGHLY RECOMM

[Girish_17]

Hi Steven,
Thanks for your reply.
I forgot to tell you that we will be using Raw Slice for Database and will be upgrading our servers to 4Gb Ram very soon (Hope fully we will get it done before).
I am planning to have swap space of 4 Gb. Also we have two internal hdd of 73GB each and even we can borrough upto 100GB from shared storage as and when required. So storage part is not at all a problem.

So do u have any more comments on this setup.

Thanks again.
Regards,
Girish