3.7.0 HP StorageWorks HP Scalable NAS File Serving Software provisioning guide for Oracle HP Scalable NAS (AG513-96013, October 2009)

5 Direct NFS client considerations on
Windows systems
Oracle 11g on Windows supports NFS for the first time, but only using Direct NFS
and only for datafiles. Although the Oracle RDBMS can recognize datafiles using
Direct NFS, many commands cannot. It is therefore necessary to provide shared
access to the datafiles via other means, such as possibly via a CIFS mount or a
Windows-based NFS client.
Oracle does not allow use of NFS or CIFS protocols for every Oracle object. For
example, Windows 11gR1 RAC clusterware files are not supported over Direct NFS
(or any NFS client). Clusterware files must be created using storage that is shared
local raw storage, shared iSCSI, or by using the Oracle clustered filesystem (on either
shared local or shared iSCSI storage). It therefore cannot be placed on a Virtual NFS
Service. It is possible to configure open source iSCSI on the (Linux-based) NFS Servers
to use for clusterware files; however, the open source iSCSI software may not be
reliable for production purposes. There is no virtual iSCSI service provided with HP
Scalable NAS, so if the iSCSI connection fails, there is no means to failover to another
server node as can be done with a Virtual NFS Service.
Although the database engine will use direct NFS to access datafiles, there are other
utilities that will not (e.g., dbv, dbca). Consequently, the use of Direct NFS can be
inconvenient unless another form of connection is also in place, either another NFS
client or CIFS. For a DBA to carry out other maintenance tasks, some other means
of mounting the datafiles from an Oracle database on Windows is necessary. See
the Oracle installation guides and metalink articles listed in Appendix A, page 49,
for more information.
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