Installation guide

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We recommend disabling automatic memory management:
SGA_TARGET = 0
MEMORY_TARGET = 0 (Oracle DB 11g)
MEMORY_MAX_TARGET = 0 (Oracle DB 11g)
Set automatic memory management for the program global area (PGA):
PGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET and WORK_AREA_POLICY set to AUTO
VMA-series Memory Array storage setup
VMA arrays can be connected directly to existing hardware or can be combined into a hardware
refresh or new opportunities. The following best practices are recommended when using the DL980
and VMA in an Oracle database environment:
The first step towards installing the VMA drivers is to ensure that all of the required VMA packages
are installed on the host server prior to the installation and configuration of the VMA driver.
The VMA arrays are pre-formatted at 65% of the available storage for improved write performance.
Slots capable of bi-directional x8 PCIe provide the best performance.
On the server enable asynchronous I/O.
Flash-based memory arrays are designed for 4KB block access or any multiple of 4KB blocks.
Smaller block sizes (for example, 512 bytes) will significantly reduce performance, particularly for
writes. Therefore, it is import that you verify whether the file system and operating system are 4KB
aligned.
Use the Parted software tool to create 4 to 16 partitions across each array and leverage ASM to
concatenate the volumes into a common disk group or groups.
Be sure to set the offset in Parted to 1MB to ensure a 4KB boundary for I/O.
512B partitions start at 2048s
4096B partitions start at 256s
Balance the workload evenly across all VMA Arrays.
Depending on your workload set the allocation unit (AU) to 1MB or 4MB. When using Oracle
Automatic Storage Management (ASM), you have an option to enable software mirroring. Our
recommendation is not to implement Oracle ASM mirroring because the arrays are designed to
meet five 9s of high availability without incurring the I/O overhead of Oracle mirroring or the
50% reduction in usable storage space.
Recommended to increase the I/O Q-depth to 256 on the DL980 (default is 16).
It is best to use dual 208V power cords/supplies for most optimal performance.
For applications that require high availability, the use of Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) is
fully supported; however, it is not required. For customers that are using Oracle Enterprise Edition,
Oracle Data Guard configured with Fast Failover is the recommended high availability solution.
This solution is a good match for the simplicity of the HP VMA configuration. There are also other
replication products that are fully supported with VMA arrays.
HP and Oracle both recommend using the Linux kernel’s Huge Pages feature (which necessitates the
disabling of Oracle Automatic Memory Management).