In this Document

Applies to:

Purpose

This document presents an collection of external storage system related information to be used with Oracle Linux configurations.

Note that the list provided might be incomplete or not up to date. Please refer to provided links for detailed information.

Scope

This document applies to Oracle Linux configurations with external storage systems. This document is to be used by system design engineers and administrators planning for a new Oracle Linux system.

Details

DM-MPIO

DM-MPIO stands for Device Mapper Multipathing I/O. Oracle Linux and RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) includes the DM-MPIO technology which has been developed closely with vendors like EMC. DM-MPIO provides advantages listed below and not limited to:

• User and kernel space tools for management and support
• More flexibility when upgrading kernels as the DM-MPIO has been accepted upstream in the Linux kernel development team (i.e. updated drivers will be shipped with each updated kernel). On the other hand with proprietary drivers, a new driver package will be required for the new kernel version.
• Boot-from-SAN support is much easier to setup with DM-MPIO
• Multipathing support available during installation of OS
• Hardware vendors are starting to recommend/support DM-MPIO in certain storage configurations

For more information on DM-MPIO and also for various cases / implementations see

• multipathd.conf configuration for Data ONTAP 7.2.x with ALUA

Oracle Validated Configurations

There are various configurations which had been validated by Oracle / partners and customers are listed dynamically at Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN). For specific external storage (HP, EMC, NEC, Sun, Compellent, Dell, NetApp, Inspur, Pillar and more) configurations with Oracle Linux please:

• Browse to http://linux.oracle.com/validated-configurations
• Enter "OEL" in the search box. Click "Go" - that will provide you older validations but still applicable
• Enter "Linux" in the search box. Click "Go"
• See also the Oracle Technology Network Validated Configurations page

Recommendations / Tips

• Prefer DM-MPIO (device-mapper-multipath)  (v.s. other frameworks) features available in Oracle Linux because it is basically hardware agnostic to a broad extent.
• Verify LUNs via 'cat /proc/partitions' and 'dmesg'
• Use drivers integrated with Linux kernel where possible. i.e. Not third-party drivers
• OCFS2 1.2 does not support online filesystem resize. Use OCFS2 1.4 or later to have resize enabled with OCFS2.
• Use OCFS2, GFS, etc. for shared filesystem across cluster nodes rather than NFS