Ketynote session at TROUG Day 2012 Symposium

Well, I have got very exciting news to share with you all here. For the first time ever in my professional career, I would be presenting a keynote session: Yet another milestone in my professional career. I am indeed very much excited, at the same time, a bit nervous too.

I would be presenting a keynote session on 'Oracle 11g High Availability New Features' topic at the upcoming Turkish Oracle User Group(TROUG) Day 2012 Symposium scheduled on the 11th October 2012.

The following is a brief synopsis of the event:

TROUG Day 2012

Etkinlik Programı:

IOUG Virtualization SIG Symposium - November 7-8, 2012

Interested learning more about Virtualization and Oracle VM technologies? Don't wait, just enroll now  to the upocming IOUG Virtualization SIG Symposium, scheduled on November 7-8, to hear what the world known virtualization experts has to say about the technologies.

Here is a brief synopsis/highlights of IOUG SIG Virtualization Symposium:
 
November 7 - Oracle on Oracle VM
Register Today
10:00am - 10:55am           Oracle on Oracle VM - Expert Panel
11:00am - 11:50am           Successfully Deploy the Infrastructure Cloud with Oracle VM
12:00pm - 12:50pm           The RAC OVM Templates and the new DeployCluster tool on OVM3
1:00pm - 1:50pm                The Latest on Oracle VM
2:00pm - 2:50pm                Simplyifying Application Deployment in Cloud Using Virtual Assemblies and EM 12c

November 8 - Oracle on VMware
Register Today
10:00am - 10:55am           Virtualization Architecture and Performance Metrics
11:00am - 11:50am           Oracle Virtualization Best Practices from VMware Support
12:00pm - 12:50pm           Virtualization Migration Strategies
1:00pm - 1:50pm                Storage Best Practices for Oracle on VMware
2:00pm - 2:50pm                Raising the Bar with Oracle on Vblock(tm) Systems
Oracle on Oracle VM - Expert Panel
Panelists: Tariq Farooq, Honglin Su, Kai Yu, Mike Ault
Virtualization is the foundation stone in the cloud computing era.   In this session, expert panelists and speakers present, detail and elaborate on a comprehensive concepts overview, insights, recommendations, best practices, current strategies, pros and cons, relevance/role in cloud computing, prevalent/dominant paradigms and technologies and a whole lot more about virtualization as it relates to Oracle DBAs - from the perspective of Oracle on Oracle VM.

Successfully Deploy the Infrastructure Cloud with Oracle VM
Speakers: Charles Kim, Nitin Vengurlekar
Virtualization is the process of abstracting computing resources such that multiple operating system and application images can share a single physical server, bringing significant cost-of-ownership and manageability benefits.  Though its Oracle VM, Oracle offers scalable, low-cost server virtualization solutions for varying workloads and applications, as well as the driving force behind consolidation.  Over the past couple of years, Oracle VM has become a major challenger in the Oracle Database virtualization space.  If you are considering Oracle databases on Oracle VM, you cannot afford to miss this session by Charles Kim and Nitin Vengurlekar, Managing Directors from Viscosity North America, as they share their virtualization experiences on successfully deploying Oracle VM and describe how customers can achieve lower CapEx and OpEx using Oracle VM.
Key topics covered in their presentation will be:
- OVM History and Architecture
- OVM Core Features
- OVM 3.x New Features
- Importance of Templates
- Deployment Workflow
- Steps towards Virtualization
- Challenges
- Best Practices

The RAC Oracle VM Templates and the New DeployCluster Tool on OVM3
Speaker: Saar Maoz, Consulting Software Engineer, Oracle Corporation
The popular RAC OVM templates were refreshed this summer to more optimally support OVM3.  A new tool called DeployCluster allows for even faster automation then ever!  End to end (including network setup) clsuter build with no Dom0 or Guest VM access.  All previously released RAC tempates can be mixed and matches and full backwards compatibility is retained for OVM2 users.  Come see for yourself how easy it is to deploy RAC in an OVM2 environment.  Demos will be show live as time permits.

The Latest on Oracle VM
Speaker: Ronen Kofman, Director Product Management, Oracle VM, Oracle
Oracle VM has come a long way with great customer interest and analyst recognition.  In addition to the application-driven architecture and design to scale, Oracle VM continues to drive integrated management into all aspects of the product.  Join us in this session to get a technical deep dive of the latest features in Oracle VM and expanded management support.

Simplifying Application Deployment in Cloud Using Virtual Assemblies and EM 12c
Speaker: Kai Yu, Dell Oracle Solutions Engineering
Oracle virtual assemblies provide a great way to simplify the deployment of enterprise-class multi-tier applications and their configuration dependencies.  Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder 11gR1 can create Oracle virtual assembly packages by capturing the state of an installed application topology.  Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c can deploy there assemblies in the cloud resulting in fully operational application stack within minutes.  This session will walk you step by step through the Oracle virtual assembly creation process.  This session will also demostrate how you can use Oracle Enterprise Manager 12 Cloud Control to deploy an assembly in a self-service cloud built on a Dell platform.

Virtualization Architecutre and Performance Metrics
Speaker: George Trujillo, VMware
Attendees will learn virtualization architecture foundations, reference architectures and key performance metrics for running Oracle in virtual infrastructures.

Oracle Virtualization Best Practices for VMware Support
Speaker: Mike Matthies, VMware
This session will focus on best practices from a VMware support perspective.  VMware support will show attendees how to avoid common mistakes, misunderstandings of configurations and best practices learned from the trenches.

Virtualization Migration Strategies
Speaker: Charles Kim, Viscosity NA
This presentation will focus on Oracle virtualization best practices.  Topics will include the Oracle Virtual Infrastructure, migration options with the same endianness, migration options for different endianness and best practices.

Storage Best Practices for Oracle on VMware
Speaker: Brad Davie, EMC
Storage is a key component of any virtualized infrastructure.  The speaker will discuss storage hardware and software capabilities, and provide a comprehensive set of storage best practices designed to enhance performance, scalability and availability of Oracle databases running in a VMware environment.

Raising the Bar with Oracle on Vblock(tm) Systems
Learn how VCE delivers a pre-engineered and validated converged infrastructure to reduce costs, speed time to value and de-risk Oracle deployments.  Gain an inside perspective on harnessing the power of Vblock(tm) Systems to ensure and predictable Oracle performance, as well as enhanced operational agility and scalability for E-Business Suite R12 & RAC.

Look forward to see you VIRTUALLY.

Applying a PSU patch in a large, complex cluster env.? Think of these basics

After successfully applying the latest PSU (7) patch in two non-production and one production 11gR2 cluster environments, now its time to get ourselves more tougher and stronger. Its now time to apply the patch in the most business critical and very complex cluster (20 node) environment.

With our past patching experience in different cluster environments, we noted that the average time that took to patch an individual home, GI/RDBMS was about 45 min, overall close to 2 hours duration for a node. Keeping that equation in mind, to patch a 20 node cluster env., it gonna roughly take about 40 hours non-stop action to complete the task.

Having said that, this time around we have got different business requirements, like, patching  nodes randomly and splitting the action into two consecutive week-ends. Although, the patching activity is going to apply in a rolling fashion, which gives us the advantage to prevent service interruption,  I had raised the concerns mentioned below with Oracle  Support:

• Is it mandatory to patch all nodes in a cluster in sequence? Can we apply the patch randomly on the nodes? (we had a terrible time once applying the patch randomly, wanted to take no risk this time around).
• Is there any workaround to expedite the patch deployment duration? Like, applying the patch in parallel, i.e., patching multiple nodes together.
• Can we split the activity in to two weeks time frame?

Here is what Oracle Support has to say:

•  The sequence does not matter technically. Any node can be patched as per the workload/availability conditions.
• ent versions of the components. So in sort, please **do not ** keep the patching incomplete for more that 24 hours.***BUT*** it is not supported to keep some of the nodes unpatched, since this can bring un-stability in form of direct incompatibility between some component or in form of differential performance due to differ
• Please do not attempt patching the patching of the nodes in parallel, since the OCR gets updated separately for individual node, you are introducing a huge risk of "soft corruption" in the OCR by unintended overlapping of the OCR updates.

I am not pretty convinced with the last point. With 11gR2, Oracle cluster now maintains a local OCR copy on every individual node in the cluster. Why don't they make use of this opportunity and let us patch in parllel to speed up the process on a very large and complex environment.

I would be desperately looking forward for the parallel patching improvement in the future Oracle releases.

Happy reading

Jaffar

 

Bug 14026888 - Datapump import gets ORA-600 [kpudpxcs_ctxConvertStream_ref_1] [ID 14026888.8] - ORA-31693,ORA-02354,ORA-00600

When a full database datapump import operations executed this morning to load data from an Oracle 11gR1 db to 11gR2 db, the job got failed with the following ORA errors on over 50 tables that has LOB data type:

ORA-31693: Table data object failed to load/unload & is being skipped due to
ORA-02354: error in exporting/importing data
ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [kpudpxcs_ctxConvertStream_ref_1],  

              [SYS_TYPEID("SHAPE")

A very quick research about an ORA-600 error in the metalink brought the following facts and workaround to our knolwedge:

Bug 14026888 - Datapump import gets ORA-600 [kpudpxcs_ctxConvertStream_ref_1] [ID 14026888.8]

Affects: Product (Component) Oracle Server (Rdbms) Range of versions believed to be affected Versions BELOW 12.1 Versions confirmed as being affected 11.2.0.3 Platforms affected Generic (all / most platforms affected) Fixed: This issue is fixed in 12.1 (Future Release) 11.2.0.4 (Future Patch Set)

Since there is no fix available yet, we applied the workaround, used conventional exp/imp, mentioned in the notes. Bravo, the workaround does worked and the issue got resolved..

Note : The BUG appears to be a generic one and applicable to all platforms.

addNode.sh ERROR [PRKC-PRCF-2015] and RESOLUTION

Here is a very quick and short blog update about the issue we had confronted whilst performing an addNode action.

As part our ongoing HPUX servers migration project (Superdom 1 to Superdome 2 ), we agreed on a plan, where we wanted to add same amount of nodes (new configuration) to the exists cluster environment and then delete the old nodes after successfully migrating everything over the new nodes.

Well the addnode procedure was going smoothly until the following error occurrence :
--

PRCF-2023 : The following contents are not transferred as they are non-readable
Directories:
-
Files:
1) /u00/app/11.2.0/grid_1/bin/oradaemonagent
2) /u00/app/11.2.0/grid_1/crs/utl/cluvfy
3) /u00/app/11.2.0/grid_1/srvm/admin/logging.properties

Refer to '/u00/app/oracle/oraInventory/logs/addNodeActions2012-06-22_06-27-57AM.log' for details. You may fix the errors on the required remote nodes. Refer to the install guide for error recovery.
96% Done.

 --
The previous experience on this error to perform the following action plan:

• Copy those files to the target node.
• Execute orainstRoot.sh on the target node followed by root.sh execution.
• Create a new local inventory on the new nodes followed by inventory update action across all nodes.

This time around we didn't see the instructions to manually execute the orainstRoot.sh in the error. We also found that the file (orainstRoot.sh) doesn't exists under oraInventory location on the new node.

Although it was a clearly indication of sort of permission issue, we didn't want to take the risk as its a business critical environment, and we opened a TAR with Oracle support to seek their assitance. After going through the painful process (providing logs and other feed back), the engineer asked us to add an additional read permission (chmod o+r to those files) to the files in the context and instructed to re-initate the addNode procedure.

Well, after addiging an additional read previlige to the files, the addNode procedure started over and it went on smoothly.

Small things some time can draw you crazy.  Anyways, its part of life, you need to deal with it.

Happy reading,

Jaffar