Hi:

I am in the process of configuring the SAN for Solaris to host 6 oracle 9i databases. We have 30 -146 GB disks stiped with RAID 10 for SAN. Of which 11 are dedicated for databsaes related things. Then we have 2 v880 Sun Servers with 16 -73 GB disks and 24 GB memory.

The questions are:

1) How to associate the indvidual vdisks with the mount points? I am thinking of 12 LUNS for all my databases. Then should I create 12 mountpoints on Solaris servers as well?

I am not too clear as to how to link the SAN configuration with SUN.

Then how owuld I untilize the local disks on Sun box (16 -73 GB disks) to tie in with the SAN?

Thanks for the help


Mahesh

The internal disks in a V880 are on an internal loop, and cannot participate in the SAN.

As for configuring the "SAN", that depends on the actual storage array, switches, & HBA's that you have. Generally speaking you will need to format the parity groups into LDEV's, run fiber, present LUN's to a port, configure LUN security, then configure the zones on the switch. Then assuming you are using Sun HBA's (QLogic) with the leadville drivers, you `cfgadm -c configure c# c#` the controllers, and put a VTOC on the disks.

You can use either Veritas Volume Manager and file system, or Veritas storage foundation for Oracle which also comes in an HA flavor (VCS). Veritas brings some flexibility, simplicity, and performance, but is expensive. Sun Disk Suite (SDS) and the ufs file system ship with Solaris.

If you are hardware RAID 10 on your array, I would use concatonated volumes. I usually put the ORACLE_BASE/HOME undert /app/oracle, and put the database under /u01 thru /u05, and use /u06 for archive logs. If I need a local slice for backups, I put it at /app/backups.

If using vxfs, make sure to use the largest block size that equals or is a multiple of your db/tablespace block size.

All of my V880's only have 6 internal 72GB disks. I usually use two for the OS mirrored with SDS, and the other four for rootdg with pre 4.0 vxvm. With 4.x, I make them a disk group, and would put your Oracle binaries and indexes on those disks, and the rest of the database on the SAN.

Realize that if you put disks on the SAN and the internal disks in the same disk group/set, you may have errors on boot or in single user because the drivers for the SAN HBA's have not loaded, and only part of the disk group will be visible.

Be sure to put noatime as a mount option in the vfstab, and if using ufs, also logging.