One of the biggest reasons we started to use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was that we could get Exadata provisioned for our use. We already had on-premise setup but to get similar setup in the cloud was important. I’m going to write a two part series on provisioning Exadata. On this first part I’ll discuss on…
How is my EBS instance using Exadata write-back flash cache?
When we were planning migration from commodity hardware to Exadata X5-2 one open topic we had was if it makes sense to enable write-back flash cache in Exadata. The default mode is write-through where read operations utilize flash cache but not the write operations. Write-back then uses the flash cache to both read AND write…
Resize backup LVM on Exadata
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…
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…
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…
Automated exachk
I was speaking in December at UKOUG Tech’16 and attended Andy Colvin‘s session on “5 Quick Tips for Exadata Administrators”. Andy mentioned that it’s possible to automate your exachk which sounds really good idea. We have run it earlier on a semi-frequent schedule but always manually. Wouldn’t it be good to run it for example every…
Exadata, Oracle eBS and exachk
Nice feature which I wasn’t aware earlier is that when you run exachk for your Exadata it has eBS specific section as well. So not all content is related to Exadata or databases. There are million posts about exachk so I won’t go into details on it but exachk is as per Oracle: Oracle ORAchk and…