I am a regular lurker on the list but have run sapdb in some testing
before.

I recently installed a RAC 9i Cluster using raw devices on redhat 
advanced server. To configure raw devices on a redhat machine with
an attached san the procedure is very easy.

present a lun
carve up the space into partitions with fdisk
map the partition to raw device in /etc/sysconfig/rawdevices
service rawdevices start 

Using raw devices works well but it does have some drawbacks. Just as Ralph
explained your backup strategy will need to be looked at. A raw device
cannot just be dumped to tape you need some way of dumping the data into a
format that can be saved. It is also harder to maintain and you need to keep
a good handle on what is mapped where in case you ever outgrow a presented
partition.

Cliff Baeseman
Greenheck Fan Corporation
Linux Systems Engineer



-----Original Message-----
From: Dr. Ralf Czekalla
To: Derek Hamilton
Cc: Peter Willadt; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: 3/28/03 5:28 PM
Subject: Re: Raw Devices

Hi folks,

the performance improvement depends on the used hardware. If you have a
storage server (EMC, FuSi, IBM, NEC, have I forgotten one :-) with huge
amount of cache, this improvement might be very small.
But smaller installations with standard RAID5 for Data and RAID1 for Log
and much smaller caches might show an greater improvement. But you have
to test it to say this for sure.

For setting up RAW devices please have a look into the SLES7
documentation. I assume that the SLES8 have the same info or better. At
the end of that docu you will find a detailed manual how to set this up
with SuSE. This might be the same for RedHat but never used it so far
and won't.

It's even possible to use Volume Manager inbetween but as far as I know
it is not supported for R/3 on Linux. But this info is some month old
and I don't know the current status. Nevertheless I set up a R/3 with
Volume Manager and RAW devices in December 2001 and it worked reliable
so far.

Bye Ralf


Derek Hamilton wrote:
> 
> Thanks Peter,
> 
> I was also wondering...
> 
> 1) Is there a performance improvement?
> 
> 2) Where can I find info on setting sapdb up with raw devices?
> 
> Thanks,
> Derek
> 
> > You just get more safety.
> > Nothing will interfere between sapdb and your platter, so you can be
sure
> that
> > when sapdb commits the transaction is physically stored.
> > Also not other software can mess around with your data, and you do
not
> have to
> > think about fragmentation and things like that.
> >
> > As the manual says, raw devices are extremely safe.
> >
> > The main disadvantage is probably that you have to do a database
backup to
> > save your data, even when your database is not running most of the
time.
> >
> 
> _______________________________________________
> sapdb.general mailing list
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://listserv.sap.com/mailman/listinfo/sapdb.general

-- 

Ciao  Ralf
__________________________________________________________________
Dr. Ralf Czekalla                               Tel.: 06224/922810
Am Galgenbuckel 10                        mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
D-69207 Sandhausen                         http://www.Czekalla.com

__________________________________________________________________
Dr. Ralf Czekalla                         mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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