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Best Practices for Oracle 11g Backup and Recovery using RMAN and Dell EqualLogic Snapshots

5 Test design and results: RMAN offload using

EqualLogic snapshots

In this phase of our testing we implemented a user-managed backup process, combining RMAN with

EqualLogic snapshots. The following changes were made to the system design and backup process:

• RMAN backup and recovery operations were run on an additional virtualized server (instead of

the same servers used for hosting the database workload).

• EqualLogic based snapshots of the database and redo logs were used as source data volumes

for RMAN processing.

As we have shown in the preceding sections, a drawback of using the RMAN utility is that it competes

for CPU resources on the database server. By using an additional Oracle database server to host the

RMAN backup process we eliminate this problem. To run RMAN on the backup server, it will need to

be able to mount the same ASM disk groups that contain the production database. To facilitate this we

created a collection of array based snapshots of the volumes containing the ASM database disks and

log disks using the EqualLogic Group Manager software. Figure 5 shows the addition of the backup

server host and the volume snapshot collection to the test system configuration.