We were patching Exadata and one of the YUM pre-checks failed due to invalid LVM size. We hadn’t done any resizing lately so I think issue had been there already but for whatever reason it wasn’t noticed. For backing up and rolling back on OS updates Exadata takes snapshot on identical LVM volume as the…
Optimizing performance for Oracle VM when using iSCSI storage
We implemented Oracle VM 3.3.2 around two years ago and biggest issue we had was using iSCSI storage having sub-optimal latency and throughput with parallel sessions and high load in our performance tests. In the end this was resolved by linux disk partition alignment and few iSCSI optimizations. Problem After doing the initial Oracle VM installation we started…
Passbolt for team password management
I was thinking recently that we need some tool where we store our team’s passwords for all the different logins we have. Few requirements what I came up with: The server or the password file needs to be hosted on our network There needs to be mechanism to share passwords within specific persons or groups…
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…