UNIX Desktop Questions & Answers

Good afternoon Unix folks,

I have been asked to find out if there is an ideal way to setup oracle on sun solaris. Right now, I have 2 36gig drives mirrored for my root volume.

I have 4 more raid 5 for my datavolume. For io purposes, I need to break up these drives to prove that io is the issue with the oracle setup that we have now. My boss wants me to ask if anyone has experience in installing oracle on sun. And what works for them. Any idea's would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

You should be able to show if there is a problem with I/O without breaking up the drives. Running sar is one example.

There is no 'ideal'. Each application is different - you have to know the application and understand what the different layouts will do for you. If you are running Veritas (which would be recommended - don't use DiskSuite except for the OS) then the following may help.

As an example only, a standard was built for my company but it is a guideline - I doubt any application follows it to the letter.

1. Volume Manager Configuration

1.1. Solstice Disk Suite

Disk Suite will be used to mirror the root disk. The root disk will
contain the /, /opt, /var, and swap partitions.

1.2. Veritas Volume Manager

1.2.1. Disks

Data disk names will contain controller and target. Spare disks will
contain controller and target and a special "S" suffix to indicate it
is a non-optimum disk. Log disks will contain controller and target
and a special "L" suffix to indicate it is a log disk.

1.2.2. Disk Groups

All disk groups will contain data disks, a spare, and a log disk. The
mandatory rootdg disk group will contain a single volume designated u01.
The rootdg disk group has nothing to do with the system root disk. All
Oracle systems will have a special oracledg disk group that contains all
volumes that span instances. All other disk groups will be created on a
per instance basis. These disk groups will contain a name indicative of
said instance followed by the "dg" suffix to identify it as such and
will contain data volumes.





Standards Track [Page 2]

RFC 0001 Oracle Class Definition August 2000

1.2.3. Plexes
All mirrored plexes will contain the volume name and column number followed
by "a" and "b" to represent their role in the mirror. In a simple mirror
configuration, there is only one column. In a more complex scenario, there
exist second level plexes as part of a mirrored stripe. These are the
plexes that will contain the naming convention mentioned above because
that is where the mirroring actually takes place.

1.2.4. Volumes

Each instance will have at least two redo log groups associated with it.
Each group will have two volumes associated with it. These volumes will
be mirrored. All instances will share a common backup volume. The u01
volume will also be shared amongst instances. This volume will be
mirrored. All data volumes within project disk groups will have u02 - u0n
designation. Volumes should have the following types ;

OFA (Oracle Flexible Architecture) Volumes;
u01 Application Data Concatenated Pro ( RAID 1 )
u02 Redo Logs (Grp A) Concatenated Pro ( RAID 1 )
u03 Redo Logs (Grp B) Concatenated Pro ( RAID 1 )
u04 Archive Logs Concatenated Pro ( RAID 1 )
u05 Swap Area Striped Pro ( RAID 1 + 0 )
u06 Data / Index Area Striped Pro ( RAID 1 + 0 )
u07 Index / Data Area Striped Pro ( RAID 1 + 0 )
u08 Export Area Striped Pro ( RAID 1 + 0 )

2. File System Layout

2.1. Shared

2.1.1. Backup Storage

Disk Group: oracledg
Volumes: backup
Filesystems: backup
Mount Point: /oracle/backup

2.2. Instance

All file systems, with the exception of u01, will have second level
mount points whose names are indicative of their disk group
membership and their volume name. u01 will remain a top level
directory as that it is not instance specific.

Instance: fsprod
Disk Group: fsproddg
Volumes: u02 - u08
Filesystems: u02 - u08

Standards Track [Page 3]

RFC 0001 Oracle Class Definition August 2000

Instance: hrprod
Disk Group: hrproddg
Volumes: u02 - u08
Filesystems: u02 - u08
Mount Point: /hrprod/u02 - /hrprod/u08

3. Jumpstart

( TBD )

4. Best Practices

4.1 Oracle User and DBA Group:

The dba group and the oracle user are local accounts. The standard uid
for oracle is 90. The standard gid for dba is 90. The standard home
directory is /u01/home. If there is no /u01 file system for whatever
reason, use /export/home/oracle.

# groupadd -g 90 dba
# useradd -u 90 -g 90 -d /u01/home -s /bin/ksh -c "Oracle" oracle

Also, I hope you caught my reply to your other thread. and followed the link in it.