[Ocfs2-users] Re: FW: Use of OCFS2 file systems.

[Sunil Mushran]

I try to avoid responding to such emails because I am not sure how
much credibility a partisan has in such debates. After all I have been
working on OCFS/OCFS2 the last 4/5 years.

Having said that, I have some issues with the statements. While it is true
that we can improve on the disk/net heartbeat, it is wrong to say that it
does not work or makes the cluster unstable.

We have OCFS2 running on lots of clusters in Oracle that are testing each
new revision of the database. While these machines are test boxes, they are
all running loads designed to break Oracle. I am rarely pinged about them
hitting an OCFS2 issue.

We also have internal production databases as well as Oracle customers who
are using OCFS2 with much success.

However, we do have room for improvement and we are working on it.

For the list of ongoing projects, you can peruse the OCFS2 Development
Wiki at http://oss.oracle.com/osswiki/OCFS2.

If you wish to contribute code, as this is an open source project, feel free
to ping me or the ocfs2-devel at oss.oracle.com mailing list.

Thanks
Sunil Mushran

>  
> Hi Sunial,
>  
> What are your thoughts about this message on the mailing lists?
>  
> Thanks!
> Sanjeet
>  
>  
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *From:* ocfs2-users-bounces at oss.oracle.com 
> [mailto:ocfs2-users-bounces at oss.oracle.com] *On Behalf Of *Alexei_Roudnev
> *Sent:* Friday, September 29, 2006 11:50 PM
> *To:* Bill Wells; Sunil Mushran
> *Cc:* ocfs2-users at oss.oracle.com
> *Subject:* Re: [Ocfs2-users] Use of OCFS2 file systems.
>
>  
>
> If you can avoid OCFSv2 on a RAC server, better do it. Any cluster 
> (RAC and OCFS) have it's own instability elements (OCFSv2 have a poor 
> heartbeat alghoritm and so tend to self-fence without real failure, 
> and (in addition) is relatively new. It works fine enough to be used, 
> when you really need file sharing (such as database files or backups 
> or even archive logs), but the less you use it, the better. Oracle 
> home files feels well without sharing.
>
>  
>
> // I don't see problems with OCFSv2 on SLES9 SP3-updated, but I avoid 
> to use it for mission critical file systems or heavy-duty file systems,
>
> // and I still have failure scenario, when RAC cluster could work but 
> OCFS cause full-cluster failure
>
> // If you have network problem, SAN
>
> // system restart, disk io error, etc etc - you can end up with system 
> panic or reboot, caused by OCFS -
>
> // so the less OCFS you have, the better is your system stability.
>