My Open World 2010 Session

Hi there,

You can find my joint Solidify RMAN Backup with Oracle Open Storage 7000 presentation with my esteemed friend Orhan Bıyıklıoglu held yesterday in Open World 2010.

How to Backup & Recover Enormous Databases ?

Hi there,

I am finally back from UKOUG and I am sharing my presentation on backup & recovery of enourmous databases.

Ta(e)sting ZFS on Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.4 with FUSE

ZFS (Zeta File System) is my favorite storage solution for Oracle databases (in some later post I may explain why) after ASM. Although ZFS is shipped with Solaris and Open Solaris, it is also possible to use (at least taste) it with FUSE file system in your favorite Linux distro. You can find how to use ZFS on your Ubuntu in ZED House (The ZFS on Linux with FUSE) article at Linux Pro Magazine (June 2009).

One problem for Oracle Enterprise Linux (or Red Hat if you like) distro in using ZFS was that FUSE was not shipped (and supported) until 5.4 which is the latest update. By now you can choose to install FUSE modules (development libraries, kernel & user modules, and management tools) and use any FUSE file system in your system.

It might be a bit tricky to enable ZFS on OEL 5.4 if you have no experience on FUSE, ZFS and Linux stuff. I will try to explain the installation step by step. In this post I will not dive into demos of ZFS which is available in Open Solaris related page.

Ensure that you have installed the FUSE packages during the OEL 5.4 Installation

The first point is to ensure that you have FUSE related packages (rpms)  installed with your OEL 5.4. You can ensure this by choosing the following packages during your installation:

• Development >> Development Libraries >> fuse-devel-2.7.4-8.el5.i386
• Base System >> Base >> fuse-2.7.4-8.el5.i386
• Base System >> Base >> fuse-libs-2.7.4-8.el5.i386

Download & Install SConS first

Since it is totally out of this post’s scope, I will not explain what SCons is but you can think it as a improved,cross-platform substitute for Make utility implemented in Python. ZFS-FUSE has been packed with SCons so you need to install SCons rpm first. You can download SCons rpm by clicking here (If you have any problems, click here to go sourceforge SCons download page).

Install SCons rpm as root user:

[oracle@localhost Desktop]$ su -
Password:
[root@localhost ~]$ cd /home/oracle/Desktop
[root@localhost Desktop]$ rpm -ivh scons-1.2.0.d20090919-1.noarch.rpm
Preparing...                ############################################ [100%]
     1:scons                  ############################################ [100%]

Download & Install ZFS-FUSE

Now you are ready to download and install ZFS-FUSE to your OEL 5.4. Either click here to download 0.5.0 version of zfs-fuse or directly go to download main page by clicking here. To build and install zfs-fuse

[root@localhost Desktop]# ark --extract zfs-fuse-0.5.0.tar.bz2
[root@localhost Desktop]# cd zfs-fuse-0.5.0/src
[root@localhost src]# scons
scons: Reading SConscript files ...
scons: done reading SConscript files.
scons: Building target ...

[root@localhost src]# scons install
scons: Reading SConscript files ...
scons: done reading SConscript files.
scons: Building target ...

Run ZFS-FUSE

Before using any ZFS command like zfs or zpool, you should first start up zfs-fuse daemon by

[root@localhost src]# cd zfs-fuse
[root@localhost zfs-fuse]# ./run &
[1] 8796

Test ZFS

There is a detailed test module packed with zfs-fuse. To check zfs-fuse is running you can use it. Before using it please ensure that /tmp has more than 2 GB of free space

[root@localhost zfs-fuse]# cd ../cmd/ztest
[root@localhost ztest]# ./runtest -T 300
Start date: Fri Sep 25 04:13:53 EEST 2009
5 vdevs, 7 datasets, 23 threads, 300 seconds...

After completing the test, its your responsibility to clear temporary files in /tmp

[root@localhost ztest]# cd /tmp
[root@localhost tmp]# rm ztest.*

If everything is fine, you are ready to play with zfs and apply any demonstrations mentioned above or you find on internet.

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