Tale of a platform migration Solaris 10 SPARC 10.2.0.5 to Linux 11.2.0.2.6

This is as much a note to myself how to do this in the future as it is something hopefully worth reading for you. The requirement has been precise as always: migrate a database from 10.2 on SPARC to 11.2 on Linux. In the process, go from Veritas to ASM and make it quick!

I like short briefings but this was too short. Since the database was reasonably large I opted for the transportable tablespace approach, however I now think that a massively parallel impdp with network_link could have saved me quite a bit of time.

The following is by no means  the complete story, but hopefully gives you an idea how to do these things. Always check, and document, then test (rinse and repeat). Only when proper signoff is received should you try such a process in production. Remember to script it and have at least one clean run of the scripts! This process is not super-quick, if you have low downtime requirements then consider Streams or better: Golden Gate for the process.

The source database was originally not on the terminal release, and due to certain problems with the Data Pump API before 10.2.0.5 the source was moved to the terminal release. The source was 11g Release 2 patchset 1 with the April PSU applied

Things to think about

Since I couldn’t simply go for a subset of the database with my transportable tablespace set (TTS) I had to ensure that a lot of metadata was carried across. Personally I think that TTS works best for tables and indexes!

The process of transporting/converting tablespaces is short and sweet (excluding dealing with the application):

1. Define a self-contained set of tablespaces. In other words, the tablespaces you export from the source must not contain dictionary references to other, non-exported tablespaces. For instance, you cannot export a tablespace containing a table that has an index on another outside of the transportable set.
2. Set the tablespaces you want to export read-only. This is an outage in production!
3. Export the metadata associated with the tablespaces from the source.
4. Copy tablespaces to their destination
5. Perform the platform conversion
6. Optionally make the tablespace read-write. Thanks for Jerry for pointing this out
7. Import tablespace metadata
8. Make new tablespaces read-write in source

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WARNING: FAILED to load library: /opt/oracle/extapi/64/asm/orcl/1/libasm.so

This post is long overdue, and it’s as much a reminder to myself as it is a post for you to find when scratching your head.

Here’s the situation: Oracle Restart on an Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 system with ASMLib in use. I have installed 11.2.0.2 plus the latest PSU to bring database and Grid Infrastructure to 11.2.0.2.5-so far so good. I have used the non-GUI approach and everything seemed ok until I tried to create a database for some benchmarking.

A more user friendly multipath.conf

Update

The below described changes to the device uid, gid and mode have been deprecated with RHEL6/OL 6. Back to udev rules… See http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/pdf/DM_Multipath/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux-6-DM_Multipath-en-US.pdf for more information

During some recent work I did involving a stretched 11.2.0.2 RAC for a SAP implementation at a customer site I researched TimeFinder/Clone backups. As part of this exercise I have been able to experiment with RHEL (OEL) 5.6 and the new device mapper multipath package on the mount host. I have been very pleasantly surprise about this new feature which I’d like to share.

Background of this article

Device Mapper Multipath is the “native” Linux multipathing software, as opposed to vendor-supplied multipathing such as EMC’s Power Path or Hitachi’s HDLM.

My customer’s setup is rather unique for a SAP environment as it uses Oracle Enterprise Linux and not Solaris/SPARC or AIX on the Power platform with an active/passive solution. Well if that doesn’t make it sound unique, the fact that there is a plan to run Oracle 11.2.0.2 RAC potentially across sites using ASM and ACFS certainly makes this deployment stand out from the rest.

Incrementally gathering statistics in 10g

One of the cool new features of the Oracle 11g database is that you can copy statistics and incrementally gather global stats for rlt (really large tables). I wanted to do some testing around these features in 10.2.0.4 but ran into a number of problems. So this is the story…. I have decided to split the blog post into two parts, the first which you are currently reading will detail the installation of the patch on a single instance 10.2.0.4 database with PSU 1 installed, the second post will go through an example where I made use of the new feature.

Moving OCR and voting disks to block devices in CRS 10.2

Anyone to suggest a shorter title for this: you are welcome to comment! Initially I wanted to have this in the first of today’s posts, but got side tracked. So here’s the next step in the CRS 10.2.0.5 installation: moving off the deprecated raw devices to block devices. This is something you can do with OUI in 11.1, but in 10.2 it either requires raw devices or a clustered file system. Here’s the step by step protocol of my session.

The Setup

Before talking about what I am doing a little background information is in order. This example uses single pathing, the difference to multipathing is marginal-just remember to use the logical device names instead of the physical ones. In device mapper multipathing this might be similar to /dev/mapper/ocrvotep{5,6,7,8,9} in case you map your WWID for the OCR and voting disks to a logical name called “ocrvote”. If presenting only 1 device to the server to store all copies of OCR and voting disk make sure to have it well protected on the array! With this said, here is my setup. First for the voting disk-it went to /dev/raw/raw2 during the installation:

[root@crs102node1 bin]# ./crsctl query css votedisk
 0.     0    /dev/raw/raw2

located 1 votedisk(s).

My OCR doesn’t have a mirror and it on /dev/raw/raw1

[root@crs102node1 bin]# ./ocrcheck
Status of Oracle Cluster Registry is as follows :
 Version                  :          2
 Total space (kbytes)     :    1003728
 Used space (kbytes)      :       2008
 Available space (kbytes) :    1001720
 ID                       : 1189351742
 Device/File Name         : /dev/raw/raw1
 Device/File integrity check succeeded

 Device/File not configured

 Cluster registry integrity check succeeded

Now let’s change directory to $ORA_CRS_HOME/bin before the action starts.