Some days are just too good to be true :) I ran into an interesting problem trying to install 11.2.0.3.0 Grid Infrastructure for a two node cluster. The storage was presented via iSCSI which turned out to be a blessing and inspiration for this blog post. So far I haven’t found out yet how to create “shareable” LUNs in KVM the same way I did successfully with Xen. I wouldn’t recommend general purpose iSCSI for anything besides lab setups though. If you want network based storage, go and use 10GBit/s Ethernet and either use FCoE or (direct) NFS.
Here is my setup. Storage is presented in 3 targets using tgtd on the host:
- Target 1 contains 3×2 GB LUNs for OCR and voting disks in normal redundancy.
- Target 2 contains 3×10 GB LUNs for +DATA
- Target 2 contains 3×10 GB LUNs for +RECO
iSCSI initiators are Oracle Linux 6.4 on KVM with the host running OpenSuSE 12.3 providing the iSCSI targets. Yes, I know I’m probably the only Oracle DBA running SuSE, but to my defence I have a similar system with Oracle Linux 6.4 throughout and both work.
So besides the weird host OS there is nothing special. Since I’m lazy sometimes and don’t particularly like udev I decided to use ASMLib for device name persistence on the iSCSI LUNs. This turned out to be crucial, otherwise I’d never had written this post.
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