On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 01:00:48PM -0500, Matt Lawrence wrote: > The Oracle folks are really interested in selling us some Exadata units, > so I thought I would ask here about any experiences. > > Has anybody used them? What did you think? Any particular headaches from > the sysadmin side? > > This is a very proactive question, I don't expect that my management is > going to be willing to spring for these, I just want to have a bunch of > answers ready if I get asked.
We have one in and are starting to migrate to it. Can't speak to the performance yet for us, but it was nice having a fully integrated RAC cluster and storage system show up ready to go. The cluster nodes can be treated just like any system, but changes to the storage cells are very limited (i.e. you can't use LDAP or run monitoring applications there). The rack has almost no room available in it, and adding the necessary 3 cables to the 8 db servers is pretty difficult given the tight working conditions. The cable management arms on the db servers aren't quite up to the task and supposedly there's a better quality arm available as a field upgrade. I've got some photos of our install here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jwasilko/sets/72157623606077317/ Oracle only provides a single gigE network (unbonded) for backups, which is not ideal. We're going to pursue an infiniband connected linux host as a router to our 10gig ethernet network as a workaround. -jeff _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
