Installation guide

http://www.suse.com/oracle/ Page 6
Pre−Installation
Tips for the OS Installation
Partitioning: Ideally you have partitioned your system in a way that allows you to install Oracle
and the database file on different partitions than the OS. The advantage is that when you have to
update the operating system at some point you can do a complete new, fresh installation and
reformat the OS partition without loosing your Oracle installation and/or data. We recommend to
place the Oracle installation in /opt/oracle, for the only reason that this is what our add−on package
orarun9i.rpm, described below, has as a default.
Here is an example for a setup we would recommend for a production system:
The hardware consists of two main systems: A computer system (the server) with one or better two
internal disks and a hardware RAID controller, and an external storage unit with lots of space,
typically connected via an external SCSI cable or a fiber channel cable (more robust).
This document only considers the server unit, the configuration of the external array where the
database contents will be stored on depends on the application. There are Oracle performance
guides available − in bookstores and for free from Oracle on OTN as online books and whitepapers
− that deal with that database administration topic. We do not need to concern ourselves with it at
this point.
We suggest that you have at least two internal drives in the server unit, configured in a RAID−1
(mirroring) configuration in the hardware RAID controller of the server to protect us against the
loss of one of the drives. There should be three main areas (partitions) on the disk (the virtual disk
the SuSE Linux installer sees as provided by the hardware RAID controller). One is the swap
space, the other one is for the operating system − possibly further divided e.g. to put logfiles and
the temporary directory in a different partition − and the third one is for the Oracle installation.
You should give ca. 1.5−4 GB to Linux, at least 1 GB for swap and the rest is for Oracle.
Mirror
Disk
SuSE Linux
Enterprise Server 7
Oracle 8.1.7.x
Swap Space
Oracle Database
RAID 1
RAID 10
Oracle
Linux
swap
System Disks
External Storage Array
Setup depends on the application!