White Papers

Best Practices for Oracle 11g Backup and Recovery using RMAN and Dell EqualLogic Snapshots
10
Some key design details in the test system configuration:
• We hosted the Oracle 11g R2 RAC database on the two Dell PowerEdge R710 Database servers
as shown in Figure 1.
• VMware ESX 4.1 was hosted on another, separate Dell PowerEdge R710 server. We configured
a Linux VM (RHEL 5.5) on the ESX server to run Oracle.
• We stored the production database volumes on the EqualLogic PS6010XV array. The backup
target volumes were stored on the EqualLogic PS6010E array. The database and backup arrays
resided in separate pools in the same PS series group.
• Oracle ASM
1
• We stored the Oracle Clusterware files (OCR and voting disk) using the ASM cluster file system
(ACFS).
(Automatic Storage Management) managed the database elements, redo logs,
archives, and flash data.
Refer to Appendix A for configuration details of each test system component.
3.1 Database layout
The EqualLogic arrays listed below were used for validating the solution:
• EqualLogic PS6010XV
2
o 14 x 300GB 15K RPM SAS disk drives in a RAID 10 configuration with two hot spare disks
:
o 10GbE dual-port controller running firmware version 5.0.2
• EqualLogic PS6010E
3
o 14 x 700GB SATA drives in a RAID 50 configuration with two hot spare disks
:
o 10GbE dual-port controller running firmware version 5.0.2
1
http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/10g/AutomaticStorageManagement10g.php
2
EqualLogic PS 6010XV Product details: http://www.equallogic.com/products/default.aspx?id=8973
3
EqualLogic PS 6010E Product details: http://www.equallogic.com/products/default.aspx?id=8949
Note: For the VMware ESX based backup server we used the RHEL iSCSI initiator in the
guest OS. Doing this insured that that the Oracle instance on the backup server
could be started using the same ASM disk group labels that were used by the
production database server.