Installation guide

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Figure 6. I/O slots vs. processor boards connectivity
Note
Do not use slot 1 for any HP FC PCIe HBA Cards due to low I/O performance
(PCI-x 100 MHz).
Make sure the FC cards have up-to-date firmware installed. Out of date firmware on Fibre Channel cards may cause
performance problems under the extremely high I/O rates possible with this configuration.
Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) I/O configuration and disk layout
Oracle 11gR2 ASM was used for the database storage. Oracle ASM is a volume manager for Oracle database files
that supports single-instance Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) configurations.
Oracle ASM uses disk groups to store data files; an Oracle ASM disk group is a collection of disks/LUNs that Oracle
ASM manages as a unit. Within a disk group, Oracle ASM exposes a file system interface for the Oracle database
files to access. The content of files that are stored in a disk group is evenly distributed to eliminate hot spots and to
provide uniform performance across the disks. The ASM I/O performance can approach the performance of raw
devices.
The Oracle ASM volume manager functionality can provide server-based mirroring options. However we used the
external redundancy setting since the P2000 storage subsystem was configured to mirror the storage volumes. All 48
host LUNs from the P2000 were presented to ASM using external redundancy.
Every Oracle ASM disk is divided into smaller increments called allocation units (AU). An allocation unit is the
fundamental unit of allocation within a disk group. A file extent consists of one or more allocation units. An Oracle
ASM file (control files, data, index, redo log, etc.) consists of one or more file extents. When the disk group is
created, you can set the Oracle ASM allocation unit size with the AU_SIZE attribute. In 11gR2 the Oracle ASM
allocation unit size is no longer a hidden parameter and can be set to the following sizes 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64