Oracle 10g Hardware/Software Requirments

[CassidyHunt]

Currently our system is an Oracle 8i system. We are wanting to migrate with a new server to Oracle 10g. Cost is not a major factor but we would like it to somewhat reasonable.

What server hardware is recommended for 10G?
What is the best operating system for 10G?
If Linux what is the learning curve from Windows to Linux?

What type of network topology is most desired to maximize 10G?

Thank you for your help.

Cassidy Hunt

 

[alexhu]

I think you are asking questions to which only you have the answer (or someone close to your organistaion)

There is no best operating system for Oracle, it works on many platforms.

What are you using now ?

Do you have in-house skills to move to a new operating system?

Windows to Linux is a very steep curve - why do you want to do it?

Alex

 

[CassidyHunt]

Currently we run Oracle 8i with 200 clients on this server:

Dual Xeon PIII 650 mhz
4 gigs of ram
Mirrored 9 gig system drive
Raid 5 for Data
Raid 5 for indexes
Raid 5 for logs and other stuff
Redundant Gig Nics
Redundant Power Supply
Windows 2000 Server.

Total of 17 drives. When I read about Oracle 10G sounds like Oracle recommends 24 drives.

The reason behind considering linux over windows is less maintenance on security, less overhead in handling the overall OS, and the oppurtunity to learn something new. The disadvantage to linux is we are complete Microsoft environment and we really know what to expect and how to deal with Microsoft.

We do not want to reuse our existing server because it is coming to end of life and as we have discovered the person who set it up didn't not have any understanding of how Oracle needs to be setup. Its in production so we do not want to take it out of production until we have our 10G server setup correctly and running completly in a test environment.

I am just looking for thoughts on what people experiance for best perfomance, low maintenance and overall ease of ownership.

Thanks

Cassidy

 

[alexhu]

Oracle's recommendation for 24 drives does not include RAID arrays - it's just assuming you stripe and mirror everything.

Seems like if you're running with 200 people on this box, then its fairly important to your company ?

I'm not a Windows person (UNIX - AIX) but I would stick with what you know rather than try to support a mission critical system as a LINUX newbie

If you do create a test server first I hope you are going to load test it (preferably with real users) before swapping it over to production, especially if you do go the LINUX route

Alex

 

[CassidyHunt]

Load testing is a must. That is another reason we want a seperate server. The server handles all our production software and website information.

Do you think a box simliar to above would handle 10G?

 

[alexhu]

As I said above I'm not a Windows person, so that answer is best left to someone else

Alex

 

[DBAwhosaysNIE]

There is no best operating system for Oracle" - true but there are few (if any) worse than windoze for anything.

I'm not going to lie to you: learning *nix without the tutelage of a "master" can be quite intimidating and doing your database 1st is definitely jumping into the deep end of the pool but once it (*nix) "clicks" you'll want to wash your mouth out with soap for ever having used M$. if you want to learn linux I would go get a copy of SuSE Professional (you can download but spend the $90 and support them; expense if you can) and install Oracle 10 on that as your "lab". Oracle will tell you you have to have "Enterprise" (~$1K vs. Professional) but all you have to do to trick it is create a file called "UnitedLinux-release" in /etc with the following contents:

UnitedLinux 1.0 (i586)
VERSION = 1.0
PATCHLEVEL = 3

on the hardware front the one piece of advice I would give you is go Opteron (AMD) vs. Intel. better bang for the buck. we currently buy HP (DL-385) but Sun is getting in the Opteron business and finally getting competitive on $.

 

[DBAwhosaysNIE]

FWIW my wife's in sales at Oracle and I have semi-seriously talked to some of her people before about hiring me as a consultant to go around and do exactly this: help their M$ customers convert to linux. I don't understand why they're not pressing that more (maybe fear that people will take the next step and discover MySQL/Postgres?.

 

[CassidyHunt]

Thanks for the response. I have loaded up a SUSE Linux and Mandrake Linux and have test platforms running Oracle 8i to see how they compare for stability and speed. So far I haven't noticed any difference between any of the Linux or the Window. Everything has been Rock Solid for the last 2 weeks.

As far as ever thinking about migrating to MySQL or Postgres I would have to say if you use Oracle those would be databases that you would give your kids to play with when you start to read. From what I have experianced with MySQL and Postgres, Oracle is light years if not unreachable in comparison. I don't think Oracle would have anything to fear.

I am curious about why you would choose AMD over Intel for Oracle. I have had horrible luck with every desktop containing AMD. In fact we had such horrible outcomes with the 20 desktops that we banned ever recieving any AMD in the shop. Granted that was back when 1.0 Ghz was fast so maybe they have gotten better or their server structure is better. Another thing that gets me is when I have been doing lookups I can never find a comparison between Xeon or Itanium processors. They always seem to pit them against celeron and low end P4. I am guessing they are ranking on cost because most people shopping for AMD are looking for most speed for lowest cost.

Here is the server I currently have designed:

Quad 3.2 Ghz Itanium 2 Processors
2 mirrored 15000 rpm 76 GIG SCSI Hard Drive for OS
Raid 5 with 5 Disk 15000 rpm 76 GIG SCSI Hard Drive for Oracle Data
Raid 5 with 5 Disk 15000 rpm 76 GIG SCSI for Indexes
Raid 5 with 5 Disk 15000 rpm 76 GIG for log files and misc
Dual Fault Tolerant Gig Nics
Dual Fault tolerant Power Supplies

Because the motherboard is not as easy to make fault tolerant we are implementing a fail over server of exactly the same specs as above in case that happens.

Our purchase and implementation date for this is in January so I that is why we are bringing up test boxes with our Oracle 8 system and testing them to decide if we would recieve any performance gains by using Linux and if they are worth making the switch from Microsoft.

I appreciate the responses and look forward to reading more.

Cassidy

 

[sem]

Migrating from Windows to anything else is really a great headache. Mostly because Windows is too user friendly.
Both words are in bold because it's really friendly and only for users. It may be almost equally successfully handled by experienced admin as well as by newbie. But to a certain extent, where none of them can do anything, because only Gates knows how it works. That's why most MS people don't want to know anything about internals, are quite unhappy with Oracle complexity etc.

My conclusion: untill you hire an experienced Unix guy don't even think about migrating to Linux. You would be surprised how the real world differs from that on your GUI desktop but I can not gurantee you'd like it.

Oracle on Windows works quite well (especially when you have nothing to compare with ), we had NT4 server with about 3 years uptime, moreover, Oracle on Windows is a bit less resource greedy. But keep in mind Unix/Linux if you plan to serve 2000 users in future.

Regards, Dima

http://seminihin.narod.ru

 

[DBAwhosaysNIE]

not sure if you'll be able to answer this but what version of SuSE did you get 8.1 (Oracle) to install on? most of the newer distos come with a newer glibc that 8.1 will not link against. did you (or someone) downgrade glibc or are the newer ones more backward compatible? what kernel/glibc/gcc do you have? I have a tarball (of 8.1.7.4) I created a couple of years ago that still works on newer SuSE(s) but I haven't even tried a fresh install in years.

sorry if none of that makes any sense but you have me curious...

 

[CassidyHunt]

I had an old version that I bought in 2000 and never got around to playing with. I think it is 7 something but I would have to go dig it out to look again to get the exact version. It loaded fine other than we had to use support to get it loaded.

Here is how we see the Operating system choice so far.

Goods Microsoft
1. Our network is completly Microsoft
2. All disaster recovery and Backup plans are based around Microsoft.
3. Everyone on staff has at least their MCSE.
4. Microsoft is extremly familiar and handles everything we need to handle
5. Up time is very high. In the 4 years it has been up we have had only 1 reboot due to power outage and UPS draining completly.

Negitives Microsoft
1. Security updates. Annoying and mandatory to keep a secure system. Seems everyday.
2. Heavy on mandatory services
3. Easily influenced and infected by virus's from desktops.

Linux Positives (As we see so far)
1. No security Updates
2. Services as light as you want to make them
3. Low disk space for OS

Linux Negitives
1. No experiance on staff
2. Very cumbersome and almost seemingly a work in progress rather than finished product. (probably due to lack of experiance and being familiar with Microsoft)
3. Does not really like existing completly on existing network such as policies and information transfer.

To make the move to Linux we would need to justify a signifigant performance increase in speed of serving datasets, ease of administration, and portability to developers. Currently with 8i we haven't seen anything that sticks out in better performance.

Finally we have 500 users that access the database and it seems to be growing from year to year. 2000 users would ways off. All together with consultants cost, hardware, and software we figure about $80,000.00 to make the move from 8i to 10g. We hope it is a bit high but its best to have it then ask for it later.

 

[DBAwhosaysNIE]

AH! I'm going to go out on a limb and say 7.1. that was the only 7.x I didn't have to hack to get 8.1 to fresh install. I would be seriously impressed if you said 7.3 (and weren't lying

1. linux does have security updates. the difference is unless you're upgrading the kernel you don't have to reboot it (or even restart Oracle in almost all cases). M$ puts out a ton of FUD about the number of linux patches vs. theirs but the difference is (what makes it FUD) is that most linux patches are for optional components you shouldn't have installed on an Oracle server anyway while most windoze patches are to plug the bug du jour that allows your system to be completely taken over. if you have only rebooted your W2K box once in four years you are extremely luckly it isn't a spam zombie because you haven't applied a bunch of patches (I'm assuming/hoping your uptime claims don't count patch reboots). I have linux servers that have been up > 2 yrs (REAL uptime) with up to date patches. it would be longer but we've only had them that long.

2. linux is a "work in progress". so is windoze. the difference is the linux camp admits it. how many times have linux servers DOS'd THE ENTIRE INTERNET (re: slammer)? the largest sites on the internet are run on linux. ever heard of google or weather.com? I am not aware of a large site (other than microsoft.com) that uses windoze.

3. not sure what you mean by this but once you learn *nix you'll find it's WAY easier to manage a large distributed environment. that's one of the main reasons large shops use it. we have > 400 servers, ~99% linux /.5% solaris/.5% windoze (though NONE of those have internet facing IPs).

look, I'm clearly the biggest linux evangalist on the Oracle boards on this site and as much as I would love to make another convert a production database is probably not where you want to start. try playing with apache, postfix, bind, etc. 1st but I promise if you make the investment/stay the course you'll be glad you did.

 

[CassidyHunt]

We are up to date on the patches. You do not have to reboot on Microsoft patches if you use a few scripts, sus server, and read what services it is effecting. Then all you have to do stop the services that it is effecting and apply the patch. If it is a core piece of the OS and not a service then you have to use some different tricks that basically allow you to load the system and when the system resources become available it simply pauses and switches to the new release. I wasn't here when my company purchased these things so I don't know how much they paid but that is how we keep our up time.

As a general rule we never expose our production servers to the internet. Only one server has that access for IIS.

I know I lean more to Microsoft simply because it is where my experiance lies. Eitherway we are going to be putting a linux box up the only real question is will that be our production box or just something we expiriment with.

Personally I would like to make it our Production box so we are forced to step up to that next level. Will we get our return on investment by making switch I still don't know.

I really do appreciate the responses. I guess what I am looking for is there anything you can do on the linux system that you can't do in Windows? Or is there anything you can do on both machines that just works better in Linux?

Thanks

Cassidy