Setting up Volumes and Filesystems for Oracle Database.

[Ronnie Doggart]

Hi,

I am completely new to setting up HP-UX and have had to install a RX4640 with 2 x 36GB disks used for OS and a DS2300 with 4 x 146GB Ultra 320 10K disks, running HP-UX 11.23. Initially I had problems getting a volume group created with the 146GB drives due to accepting the defaults in vgcreate. I finally got the group created by doing

vgcreate -s 8 -i 30 -p 10 -e 40960 /dev/vg01 /dev/dsk/c5t0d0

Then I created a logical volume lvol1 and mirrored it onto one of the other 146GB disks.

Next I created a VxFS filesystem, with large files, and mounted the filesystem.

Oracle is now installed but when I create large tablespaces it seems to take a long time e.g. a 4GB tablespace takes 13 minutes to create.

This seems slow to me and I was wondering if I had done something wrong when creating the volume group.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

[Bernhard Mueller]

Hi,

guess the "-i 30" was "-l 30" . You should be OK then as long as you do not want to have more than 10 disk larger than 320GB in that volume group.

Although you do not have a RAID system with cache and striping (but LVM mirroring, so in writing large files your IO performance will be less than a single disk can deliver), this actually seems quite slow.

Since LVM side is fine, you should look at the HW. I do not know the RX4640 but with the L-class you should e.g. set the scsi speed for the adapter to avoid atificially slowing down all IO.
Also run dmesg and check /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log for errors.
I the HW is OK, next would be patches. Apply latest Support Plus Bundle (GOLDBASE patches). Also check what SCSI card you have and what new patches there are (which are not yet in a Support Plus Bundle).

Regards,
Bernhard

[Mark Greene_1]

How many controllers are the disk attached to, and how are they daisy chained in relation to the volume groups and file systems?

mark

[Ronnie Doggart]

Hi,

There is one controller, an Ultra 160 that is attached to the DS2300 with the disks in the first four slots.

One point I have noticed is that when the system starts it reports the controller as 80MB not 160MB.

Ronnie

[Geoff Wild]

You would get better performance if you LVM Striped across 2 of the disks, then mirrored to the other 2 disks.

Rgds...Geoff