raw devices on nfs

[salvatore spinella]

It's possible in HP-UX 11i to define in sharable network file system (NFS) the raw devices (example: raw devices for Oracle Rac with Service Guard)?

[Steven E. Protter]

Its probably not possible. NFS exports filesystems, not raw devices. Its probably not a good idea to try.

The problem is that performance is likely to be miserable. If you go with filesystems, which oracle does support the performance problem is likely to be huge along with network congestion as well, even in a Gigabit environment.

Running oracle sized traffic through the NIC will substantially downgrade i/o performance.

I don't know if such a setup would be supported or work with Oracle. How Oracle accesses these devices is not well documented.

SEP

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Network device sharing was supported under the old System V RFS (Remote File Sharing) but not under NFS but you don't need it for your application anyway. All you need to do for RAC is share the LVOLS in read-write mode and for that you don't need, and indeed do not want, a filesystem. In your case you don't do a vgchange -a e (exclusive) but rather a vgchange -a s (shared read-write).

[salvatore spinella]

But the disks of server1 are not shared and physically connected with server2.
If raw devices are connected on server1 and i do 'vgchange -a s' on lvols, on server2 what command must i do?

[Fred Ruffet]

In case of a RAC installation, you need as hardware (at least) 2 servers with their own OS installed on their own internal disks and a SAN/SCSI array connected to both servers. Raw LVs areon this array, configured for concurent access.
You won't have to share internal disks.

Note : NFS stands for Network File System, so it needs a FS.

Regards,

Fred