Oracle Rant

Well VirtualBox has always supported RAC but it did not support the shared disk component that VMWare supported. Many people have asked for this functionality but were rebuffed. The problem is that VirtualBox would lock the disk so that only one Virtual Machine could have access to the disk at one time. Now that Sun has been acquired by Oracle this functionality has been added.

If you were using VMWare workstation/server so that you can run a test RAC environment, well then your prayers have been answered (unless you already paid for VMWare). In my opinion, you no longer need VMWare since VirtualBox is the complete solution. For more details please visit virtualbox.org, and for specific instructions on how to set this up, please go here and look at the section on sharable hard disks.

List all srvctl commands

srvctl –h

Shutdown service

srvctl stop service –d database_name

Shutdown the database on all nodes

srvctl stop database –d database_name

Shutdown a specific instance

srvctl stop instance –d database_name -i instance_name

Shutdown nodeapps (includes listener)

srvctl stop nodeapps –n node_name

! node_name is usually the hostname of the machine

Shutdown the listener

srvctl stop listener –n node_name

Shutdown ASM

srvctl stop asm –n node_name

To Startup, replace stop with start.

If you shutdown the database it will stop the service since the service is dependent upon the database. The reverse is also true. If you startup the service it will implicitly startup the database.

To check to see if your services are running.

$CRS_HOME/bin/crs_stat –t

If you want more detailed information, drop the –t.

$CRS_HOME/bin/crs_stat

You may include the $CRS_HOME/bin in your $PATH for ease of use.

I wanted to pass on a tip to anyone doing ASM or CRS or both on Sun Solaris. When you install CRS, ASM, or both, you have to use raw devices. CRS needs the raw devices for the OCR and voting disks. ASM needs the raw devices so that it can control them and offer them in storage pools known as disk groups. Solaris uses a Virtual Table of Contents (VTOC) file that it uses to share devices between servers. When the disk is formatted by your Solaris SA, you need to make sure they do not use the first cylinder. Instead of using cylinder 0 to whatever, they need to use from cylinder 1 to whatever, leaving cylinder 0 alone. That way, when you dd the disks it will not cause the disks to “disappear”. My Solaris admin and I went through it about 4 times till we found the catch. The documentation on metalink is a little fuzzy so hopefully this helps some people out.

Also, with raw devices, I would suggest using an mknod command to label the disks so that it is much easier to support in the future.

Memorial Day slowed me down and right now I am so busy at work that I haven’t had time to study. I do have a post half way complete on data pump but I can finish that this weekend. So what can I blog about in the meantime?

Well today I have to install an Oracle RAC environment on AIX. Next month I have a Solaris environment to setup that is RAC. I did 3 Linux ones last month (All Red Hat). What I will do is post through the install and what hiccups I ran into as well as what the gotcha were with each system.

So here we are 9:00pm at night and I will be trying to get this done throughout the night. I am actually working on 3 posts in parallel. This, partitioning of some tables for another database (a partitioning post YEAH!), and then a post on some more Veritas Backup jobs that I will be writing using the Veritas NetBackup Agent. All good stuff. When I finish that I will try and get some more OCP 10g DBA posts up.

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