Best Practices for Oracle Automatic Storage Management and Hitachi Replication Software Webinar Questions and Answers

1. Can we get a copy of your slides? Yes. They will be on www.hds.com/webtech as an archived pdf. 2. Is this in a whitepaper? Yes. The whitepaper is on the Hitachi Data Systems and Oracle websites titled Oracle 10g Automatic Storage Management Best Practices with Hitachi Replication Software on the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform Family of Products. 3. What skill sets will a DBA now need to manage LUNs? OR will some sort of interactive panel be presented to ensure that the DBA only uses the LUNs he or she should be using? The LUN ownership needs to be changed by the System Administrator on UNIX platforms to be owned by oracle. Otherwise Oracle ASM cannot touch them. When that is done, Oracle can use them and assign them into an Oracle ASM disk group with ASM SQL commands, the Database Creation Assistant (DBCA) or the Oracle Universal Installer wizards. On Windows, the LUNs must be stamped with a utility called asmtool before they can be used. 4. Are Tier 2 storage LUNs OK for Archive and Redo disk groups? Tier2 may be ok for Archive logs. The redo logs are the active Oracle logs and should be the highest performing luns. Usually Tier2 is not recommended for Redo logs, but this is all dependent on the performance required for the database. 5. Why would one choose 1284K over 1M for Same? SAME (Stripe and Mirror Everything) approach to storage layout. With Oracle 10g ASM you dont have a choice for 1284K. Only 128K or 1M. That was a typo. (1284K instead of 128K).

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Oracle ASM whitepaper recommends two ASM DGs. One for data and one for Flash and Archive. What are your thoughts on this? This depends on the specifics. Where are the REDO logs? Are they in the Flash/Archive disk group. There are some limitations by placing these in the same disk group on restore scenarios.

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Is it better to stripe on a server side across all LUNs from different RG, or concatenate is OK? If stripe, then how many stripes per RG is recommended? This is outside the discussion of Oracle 10g ASM since ASM will stripe (and not the OS at the server). Striping, concatenation, luns per raid group are all factors that depend on the application workload profile (reads vs. writes, sequential vs. random) and setting qdepths. Please refer to the performace group whitepapers for recommendations on this topic.

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Please define RAC acronym? RAC is an Oracle term for (Real Application Clusters) Oracles built-in clustering software

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What about instance recovery if the redo isn't Hitachi ShadowImage/ Hitachi TrueCopy Remote Replication Software? The webex and whitepaper scenario was primarily showing how a restore to the primary server would be handled. To bring up a remote server then redo logs must be defined or replicated.

10. How is TrueCopy different from Hitachi Universal Replicator regarding cache usage? Please refer to the TrueCopy and Universal Replicator manuals for more detailed information for sidefile, journal cache, and journal usage. 11. Do we have references for both TrueCopy and Universal Replicator with Oracle ASM? Yes. These are available. 12. Regarding TrueCopy and Universal Replicator. slide shows only DataDG and FlashDG replication, but not RedoDG. Would it make sense to replicate redo logs too for faster recovery? It depends on the recovery scenario. The restore scenario was a failure in a datafile so DATADG was the group restored. 13. On slide 16 and 17, why are the redo logs not replicated? Redo logs are typically duplexed within Oracle and the scenario was a DATADG restore. Depending on the scenario , it is recommended to also replicate the redo logs. 14. Did you say using -m grp only for Oracle ASM? The ShadowImage -m grp option is required for Oracle ASM for consistent splits. It is recommended to use this option by default for any ShadowImage group regardless of the application.

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15. Does ASM support DMP - from Veritas rather then HiCommand Dynamic Link Manager? Yes. 16. What is -IM0 option? It is a CCI syntax to specify Instance 0 and ShadowImage via the command line rather than specifying it with environment variables. 17. Is the "-m grp" mode option a default for TrueCopy Asynchronous? TCA and HUR have consistency groups defined with the -f async <CTG#> format. The -m grp format is for ShadowImage 18. Can the Secondary LUNs be backed up to tape? Since you are not using filesystems, you have none to mount another server to backup to tape. The secondary LUNs are mounted within Oracle and backed up to tape with RMAN (Oracle Recovery Manager) or another program (Netbackup, CommVault, etc.) that communicates with RMAN. 19. How does CommVault work with ShadowImage for hot backups of RAC? Using a scripted commands to CommVault and CCI (Hitachi Command and Control Interface) along with any specific Oracle, Host OS commands. 20. Is it better to partition disk LUNs like /dev/sda, /dev/sdb into multiple disks like /dev/sda1,/dev/sda2,/dev/sdb1,/dev/sdb2 etc. and then add /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 into one Disk group or just create /dev/sda1 and then create a disk group using just one partition? No. It is recommended that to use the entire LUN is best with Oracle 10g ASM. 21. If we add space to data groups do we need to account for the increased space on the split mirror side? In other words is there anything we need to adjust before doing a spilt if space has been added? If you add/change/delete LUNs to a disk group then the replication groups need to be changed accordingly along with the changes to LUNs assigned to the remote servers. 22. Why would one choose 1284 over 1M for SAME? That was an error in the document, it should read 128K, not 1284K. Our apologies for the confusion. 23. What about TEMP space? Doesn't need to be replicated. Temp is part of DATADG. Yes it is replicated. 24. What version of HiCommand Dynamic Link Manager? Usually the latest. HDLM on AIX is the most specific regarding Oracle 10g ASM.

2007, Hitachi Data Systems Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

25. Is there any risk involved by not doing the ShadowImage of redo disk group? It depends on the restore scenario. Usually the REDO logs are duplexed within Oracle. If you are using remote replication (TCA, HUR) then you will probably replicate these. 26. These practices could be similar to Oracle on Cluster Environment? Yes. The ASM backup pieces are similar. If you are running Oracle 10g RAC & ASM then there are some added steps to handle the multiple nodes in the cluster and to backup CRS (OCR & Voting Disks) are needed.

2007, Hitachi Data Systems Corporation. All Rights Reserved.