An interesting 5 day EMC SAN Storage Implementation course

When I reached the office this morning, I have been informed by my manager that my name has been suggested from the DBA team to attend the SAN Storage Implementation 5 day course and I must rush to the training center right away. It was a bit suprise news for me and I initally thought its not my cup of tea, but, still wanted to attend.

Today, we have just completed day 1 class in which all the basic stuff about SAN storage (specially EMC) has been discussed and I must say it is really worthy attending this training. It did really help me to clear some of the basic concepts which I was thinking about SAN Storage.

Now, I can talk about, what is a SAN Block Box (what does it consists of), what is a VLAN/VSAN, Fiber Channel, type of ports on a switch, how volume manager works, what is a LUN, port zoaning. prot channels, what is multipathing & it works, and etc. stuff. I am not sure how long I am going to keep this terminology in my memory, but, surely, this course going to give me bit of confidence to configure our RAC enviornment optimally.

I will be posting about the interesting stuff that learned in the class in coming days.

A final word about our storage. Our bank has brought EMC DMX4 SAN storage.

Happy reading,

Jaffar

Database migration across platforms and conversion of single instance to RAC

Working in a huge RAC environment, each passing day is a learning day for me. After setting up 4 node RAC on HP UX Itanium 2 Severs, the subsequent task/challenge is to migrate single instance databases (around 16) from AIX OS to HP OS and plus converting single instance to RAC.

I have started this task on a low confidence note, I would be lying if I say I was very much confident. However, as thing progress, my confidence level went high and at the end I have successfully migrated a database (single instance) from AIX OS to HP OS and then converted the single instance database to RAC database.

To give you a rough idea what I have done:

Converted database from AIX to HP using RMAN.
On HP, then, converted this databases from single-instance to RAC database. There are few ways using which you can achieve this. However, I have opted the DBCA option to execute the task.

Next step is to migrate and convert the rest of the databases using the same method.

Happy reading,

Jaffar