Alejandro Vargas' Blog

CRS Bundle Patch I was released for version 11.1.0.7.

It is available for Linux x86 and x86-64, AIX 64-bit, HP-UX Itanium and HP-UX RISC 64-bit.

Details can be found on metalink Note 810663.1 11.1.0.X CRS Bundle Patch Information

Before applying the patch be sure to follow instructions on Note 458485.1 : "How to find whether the one-off Patches will conflict or not?", to check for potential conflicts between patches already applied and the new patches.

Apply on test, check and then go on production.

On June 3, 2009 we had the 5th conference of the RAC/ASM/Linux Forum, this time at Beit HP, in Raanana, Israel.

RAC, ASM and Linux are building blocks of the HP Oracle Database Machine and we wanted to start this meeting with a review of the technology revolution that Exadata is bringing in. Ehood Baratz from HP introduced the concepts and Annie Flint from Oracle RACPack Team, that is already working on implementation projects with customers around Europe, provided a deep technology analysis.

This was followed by two Customer Case Studies:

Dina Raphael from Rafael presented their implementation case of Oracle Applications on a 3 Node Linux Cluster with 11g CRS and ASM and 10g RDBMS. They are using ASM Diskgroup rename to mount several clones of the production database on the same development server, Dina's implementation has become a reference in Israel and Europe for implementations of Oracle Applications on Linux with 11g RAC and ASM.

The second case was presented by Alon Spiegel, Senior Oracle Technology Consultant and CEO of Brillix. This is a large implementation that required higher availability, achieved using both RAID 1 + ASM Normal redundancy with failure groups located on a campus cluster, and highest performance. A very interesting design, implementation and testing effort worth to hear about.

Beit HP address is 9 Dafna Street, Ra'anana Industrial Zone. Israel
The Conference will start at 14:00

You can download the program here: RAC And ASM On Linux Forum Agenda, June 3 2009

The presentations can be downloaded here:

RAC And ASM Forum 2009, Alejandro Vargas

HP Oracle new products - Ehood Baratz

RAC, ASM and Linux on the architecture of the HP Oracle Database Machine - Annie Flint

Oracle Applications implementation over 11g Oracle Clusterware + 11g ASM + 10g RDBMS on Rafael - Dina Raphael

http://www.oracle.com/il/RACForum/presentations_030609/RAC-And-ASM-Forum-2009-AlonSpiegel.zip

Early this year I developed an ASM training that was implemented on Madrid and Tel Aviv.

The idea was to have a set of exercises that will provide lots of hands-on experience to the participants, in a few days.

On this and the following posts I will present the labs of the training.

The training was implemented using the student’s laptops. A Virtual Machine containing a Linux 5 environment setup with Oracle 10g and 11g, ready for implementing the labs, was distributed to the participants.

The requirements were :

· Laptop with a minimum of 30 GB free space on the hard disk or an external disk
· 2 / 4 GB Memory
· Sun Virtualbox 2.2 installed on the laptop

On the first lab included here : Lab1 Configuration of Devices for ASM. we created devices to be used by ASM in several different ways, the idea was to provide many examples and train the fingers on how to build ASM disks on top of them; that also provided some insights about how the discovery process works.

The whole program cover these subjects

ASM Hands-On Training Program

Training Program

DAY 1

· Getting around on the system
· ASM Architecture
· Preparing storage devices for ASM
· Preparing storage for ASM
· Loop devices,
· File system,
· Raw devices,
· Block devices
· ASMLib
· Install ASMLib,
· Create the ASM Instance
· Create the ASM instance,
· Managing diskgroups
· Kfed
· Using kfed to identify ASM Headers
· Using kfed to dump the headers of a physical device
· ORION
· Installing, configuring and running ORION simple test
· Using RMAN for Restoring a Database Into ASM
· Configure Diskgroups for restoring a database into ASM,
· Restore Database from Backup
· Normal Redundancy
· PST table
· 10g ASM Normal Redundancy Resilience test
· Drop database,
· Create Normal Redundancy Disk Group,
· Restore Database,
· Resilience test
· Additional Means for Managing ASM
· Configure XDB
· Using FTP with ASM
· Browsing ASM Directories with HTML
· Migrating Devices to ASMLib
· Migrate raw devices and block devices to ASMLib

DAY 2

· Migration to 11g
· 10g ASM migration to 11g
· Create an 11g Database in ASM
· ASM Backup, Crash, Restore and Recovery Scenarios
· Backup and Restore ASM Metadata
· ASM and Rman Crash, Restore and Recovery Scenarios Hands-On - Part I
· ASM and Rman Crash, Restore and Recovery Scenarios Hands On – Part II
· 11g ASM New Features
· Setting up 11g Compatibility Parameters
· Resilience Tests
· ASM Cloning
· Cloning a Disk group on the same server
· Bringing Up a copy of the databases on a cloned Disk Group
· Benchmarking, Monitoring and Troubleshooting
· Configure and Run Swingbench
· Configure and run OSWatcher
· Resilience Tests While Running a Benchmark Load

DAY 3

· ASM Storage Sizing
· Measuring throughput
· Defining Infrastructure requirements for Optimal Performance with ASM
· Hardware
· ASM on SAN, NAS
· ASM Metadata
· ASM Directories
· COD and ACD
· Block Dump,
· DbVerify,
· Header Dumps,
· dd
· Storage Consolidation
· Plugging ASM to a 2nd Node,
· Open the database on the 2nd Node,
· ASMCMD
· Using ASMCMD commands and options
· ASM on Extended Clusters
· Normal Redundancy
· Preferred Mirror Read
· Fast Mirror Resync
· DWDM
· Buffer Credits
· ASM on Exadata
· Frequent SR Issues on ASM