Installation guide

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Best practices when deploying
Linux operating system
 The DL980 uses HP PREMA architecture which incorporates a new node controller design with Smart CPU caching
and redundant system fabric. Combined with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, these features provide
a solution that is fully capable of supporting the most demanding, data-intensive workloads, with the reliability,
availability, and efficiency needed to run all of your business-critical applications with confidence. For more details
on Linux and Oracle best practices see Best Practices When Deploying Linux on HP ProLiant DL980. This document
also includes information about NUMA.
 Set HUGE pages for system global area (SGA) to 2MB. The main advantages of creating an SGA using huge
pages has to do with increased performance by improving the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) hit ratio and
reducing the memory footprint required for mapping the SGA.
 If you enable ccNUMA, create 5 extra huge pages per processor than the size needed for the Oracle instance.
Otherwise Oracle DB instance may not start. 8*5= 40 extra huge pages.
 Device-Mapper Multipath – use failover and failback (active/passive) only and not load balancing options for the
P2000 arrays.
 Verify CPU utilization and I/O interrupts are balanced across CPUs.
– To verify interrupts are evenly distributed, examine the system statistics for interrupts:
vi /proc/interrupts
– To verify CPUs are evenly balanced:
mpstat -A
DL980 server best practices
 Make sure BIOS settings are configured as listed in Appendix 1.
 Avoid the DL980’s PCIe bus slot 1; this is a generation 1 narrow bandwidth slot, which performs much slower than
all other I/O slots in the system
 Disable x2APIC Mode.
 Enable Hyper-Threading to maximize resource usage.
 For maximum performance install a large memory kernel, Linux 5.x supports up to 1TB but Linux 6.x will be able to
support a much larger memory footprint. This can help minimize contention for the I/O subsystem.
 Spread the same size DIMM memory evenly across all memory cartridge sockets for maximum performance. For
the 8-socket configuration install memory DIMMs across all memory sockets of the eight CPUs for optimum
ccNUMA performance.
 Use only dual or quad rank DIMMs as they are faster than single rank DIMMs.
 Configure memory per DL980 best practices to minimize memory latencies as recommended in HP ProLiant DL980
G7 Server User Guide.
 Leave the I/O Q-depth at 32 per LUN with the QLogic HBAs. The Q-depth is set at the QLogic driver level with a
Linux command.
Oracle Database best practices
 Enable NUMA mode by setting the Oracle database parameter:
– _enable_NUMA_support = true
– If NUMA is properly enabled, a message of the form “NUMA system found and support enabled” will be stored
in the Oracle alert.log file.
 We recommend disabling Oracle Automatic Memory Management:
– SGA_TARGET = 0
– MEMORY_TARGET = 0 (Oracle DB 11g)