[SunHELP] Reconfiguring an A1000

Wed May 24 14:59:54 CDT 2006

one of our highly paid Oracle consultants, in the past with smaller
disks (4GB or 9GB),  had me configure our oracle arrays as 8k blocks &
128k stripes.  With today's' larger disks (36GB or 72GB) they recommend
double bubble - 16k block size and stripe size of 256k. Also to stay
away from RAID V for anything with high I/O. Works marginally well for
stuff that is mainly Read, but mixed or mainly writes use striped and
mirrored.
You now have about the sum total of my oracle expertise.
>From the SA's perspective I can tell you that I have been surprised at
the performance improvement
since we went to Solaris 9.
Les

-----Original Message-----
From: sunhelp-bounces at sunhelp.org [mailto:sunhelp-bounces at sunhelp.org]
On Behalf Of Werth, Dave
Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2006 2:02 PM
To: 'The SunHELP List'
Subject: Re: [SunHELP] Reconfiguring an A1000

Thanks to Alejandro and Leslie for their replies.  This reply covers
both of
their messages.

My DR plans were rather vague and you've helped me focus on that.  The
suggestion to save the module profile and to mark the positions of the
old
drives as a remove them is well taken. My biggest nightmare is if
somehow
the backup I'm going to restore from turns out to be bad.  But I will
make a
clone of the backup before I start the restore which will confirm that
at
least it's readable and our backup software (Networker) has been
extremely
reliable for us for the last 11 years.

I don't understand what Alejandro meant by 'run an explorer'.  Could you
please explain?  And of course creating file systems is part of the
process.

After doing some research it looks like I might be better off
performance
wise to put the rollback segments and redo logs on RAID 1 volumes so
I'll
consider that.  I couldn't really find a recommended stripe size from
Oracle.  Our DB Block Size is 2K so I'm thinking at least 8K and maybe
up to
128K.  Any thoughts?  (The total size of our Oracle DB (data, index,
rbs) is
around 14 GB now (out of a total of 45 GB of data on the volumes) and
will
only expand incrementally after this upgrade.)

BTW, I am the DBA and everything else for this system (and my hair is
getting thinner :).  We are a fairly small outfit with 4 people in the
IT
department and everyone else is MS centric.  Performance has not been
close
to being an issue with this system so I'm not too worried about that.  I
did
update most of the firmware on the system about 2 years ago so I don't
think
I'll bother unless I have a specific reason to do that.

Thanks again, Dave.

David Werth
Garmin AT, Inc
Salem, Oregon

dave.werth at garmin.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Brigance, Leslie V, WWCS [mailto:lbrigance at att.com]

disaster plan should be fairly simple - CAREFULLY mark each drive and
slot
with a number or letter combination and if all else goes awry, put the
old
drives back.  Obviously make sure the D1000 array is powered down before
pulling any drives.  >From my experience I can tell you that RAID V
arrays
of larger disks is MUCH slower than the smaller spindles. And by all
means
stay with the stripe size Oracle recommends.

Your DBA types may be pulling their hair out. You might have to give up
some space and go to striped mirroring on some of the drives.
Good luck.

-----Original Message-----
From: sunhelp-bounces at sunhelp.org [mailto:sunhelp-bounces at sunhelp.org]
On Behalf Of Daniel Nuno

Your plan looks good to me, but I think you should also consider a DR
plan, because your downtime will be on friday and for some hours, so if
you
have any problem, will be a little bit difficult to get support or spare
parts.

Between step 5 and 6, you should consider creating the new file systems.

...

Don't forget to run an explorer and keep it safe. To extract a module
profile from rm6 could be a good idea as well.

Regards,
Alejandro

On 5/23/06, Werth, Dave <dave.werth at garmin.com> wrote:
>
> Folks,
>
> We have an E450 running Solaris 2.7 with an attached A1000.  The A1000
> currently has eight 9 GB drives and two 18 GB drives.  Five of the 9
GB
> drives are configured in a RAID 5 array, two are RAID 1 (mirrored) and
the
> two 18 GB drives are also RAID 1.  We have one 9 GB hot spare. We use
Raid
> Manager 6 to administrate this.  (I know this is old stuff but it
works
> for us.)
>
> On Friday we will be removing all of the 9 GB drives are adding nine
18 GB
> drives for a total of eleven 18 GB drives.  One will be a hot spare
and my
> plan at the moment is to configure the rest into two 5 disk RAID 5's
(but
> I'm open to suggestions if you have a better way) but I don't plan on
> changing the logical structure of the LUN's/file systems, just
increasing
> the size of each.  One other thing, the only software on these file
> systems is our ERP system and Oracle databases, no system stuff (not
even
>  the Oracle executables) which is on a mirrored set in the E450
itself.
>
> So my plan is to:
> *       Shut down Oracle and the other active software.
> *       Run a full backup
> *       Unmount the file systems and delete the configurations using
RM6
> *       Shut down the system and A1000 and change out the drives.
> *       Reboot the system and reconfigure and remount the new drives
> *       Restore the backup
> *       Reboot the system and make sure everything is ok.
> *       Go home :-)
>
> Since I don't do this very often I hope some of you may have
> comments/suggestions about my plan or at least confirm that it's a
good
> plan.
>
> Thanks, Dave
>
> David Werth
> Garmin AT, Inc
> Salem, Oregon
> dave.werth at garmin.com

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