Exadata failing RAID HBA card

This is more of informative story what happened to us recently. In the past we had issue with one of the Exadata cell node where the RAID HBA card has failed. After working with support they decided to replace the card and at the same time update the card firmware. That issue was described in detail…

Oracle OVS, Broadcom Netextreme II and 10G network

We recently upgraded our LAN network from 1G to 10G but the Oracle OVS servers network cards showed only 1G link even though the advertised link was 10G. [root@ovs1 ~]# ethtool em1 Settings for em1: Supported ports: [ FIBRE ] Supported link modes: 1000baseT/Full Supported pause frame use: Symmetric Receive-only Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link…

Exadata & host_access_control

Although we have quite wide Oracle Linux stack I had not come across with pam_tally2 before we got Exadata. If you haven’t read about it it’s module which takes care of failed logins and locks account after certain number of tries. Every now and then specially after changing the password every three months we ran…

Upgrading Oracle VM 3.3.3 to 3.4.2

Now when we have used demo 3.4.2 for some time without issues I decided to upgrade our sandbox Oracle VM setup from 3.3.3 to 3.4.2 to get experience for the actual production upgrade coming later. We have two installations of Oracle VM. One is sandbox which has some old blade servers acting as OVS and…

CELLDIAG user for Exadata

I was doing some tasks off from my task list and one of the things exachk highlighted was that we should create user CELLDIAG on cells. Beginning with Exadata Storage Server Software version 12.1.2.2.0, the storage server user “CELLDIAG” is created during deployment which allows access to diagnostics without using a more privileged user. The…

Exadata & metric_iorm.pl

Our case where to gather information was actually related to two disks going OFFLINE at the same time. As I wasn’t sure if this is normal Exadata behavior I went and created Service Request for this. This is what we saw one day: 4_1 2017-01-04T18:54:05+01:00 warning “Data hard disk entered confinement offline status. The LUN…

Automated sundiag.sh for Exadata nodes

We recently had to collect sundiag.sh output to one of our Service Requests and I followed note “Oracle Exadata Diagnostic Information required for Disk Failures and some other Hardware issues (Doc ID 761868.1)“. And while there isn’t too much of work involved I thought perhaps I could reduce few steps. Below is short script which creates…

Automated exachk

I was speaking in December at UKOUG Tech’16 and attended Andy Colvin‘s session on “5 Quick Tips for Exadata Administrators”. Andy mentioned that it’s possible to automate your exachk which sounds really good idea. We have run it earlier on a semi-frequent schedule but always manually. Wouldn’t it be good to run it for example every…

Exadata, Oracle eBS and exachk

Nice feature which I wasn’t aware earlier is that when you run exachk for your Exadata it has eBS specific section as well. So not all content is related to Exadata or databases. There are million posts about exachk so I won’t go into details on it but exachk is as per Oracle: Oracle ORAchk and…