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Performance of Oracle on NAS devices depends in part on network performance between the NFS client and server. Therefore, consider whether to use a dedicated interface for NFS control and NFS data traffic.
If NFS and network redundancy is a concern, consider creating a bonded interface for the NFS control traffic on the NFS client. On the database server, this bonded interface could be a bonded public network or even the bonded interface for the RAC interconnect in a RAC environment.
Using bonded interfaces or directing NFS control and data traffic to different NICs on the NFS client might not always be possible because of a limited number of available NICs. In such cases, using a single unbonded interface for both NFS control and data traffic may be the only possible option. However, that configuration might cause network performance issues under heavy loads because the server will not perform network load balancing. There will also be no redundancy for NFS control traffic.
When using dNFS, using multiple network paths is recommended. Oracle supports one to five network paths between a NAS server and NFS client—one path for NFS control traffic and up to four paths for NFS data traffic. Each of these paths should also be configured on a separate dedicated subnet. This includes not using the subnet of the public network for NFS. Using dedicated subnets provides network traffic isolation and simplifies the configuration of dNFS.
If there are not enough subnets available, it is possible to configure dNFS paths to share subnets. However, this is not optimal and it requires extra configuration both in the operating system and in Oracle. For the operating system, ingress filtering must be relaxed for multihomed networks, and static routes must be defined. For Oracle, file oranfstab must be created to direct dNFS data traffic to flow across paired endpoint IP addresses in the same shared subnet. This extra configuration prevents the operating system from using the default route and allows multiple NIC interfaces in a server to use the same subnet.
If a subnet is shared between NICs and the appropriate configuration is not performed in the operating system and in Oracle, the operating system chooses the dynamic route. When it does, it will invariably use the first best-matched route possible from the routing table. Usually, that route will be incorrect and will impact the environment negatively:
When different subnets are used for dNFS traffic, static routes are not needed. This simplifies the configuration and reduces the possibility of misconfiguring the environment.
All paired end-point IP addresses must be defined in the Oracle file oranfstab when dNFS data traffic is being isolated to one or more dedicated paths. This requirement applies to all environments, whether the same or different subnets are used to define multiple paths for dNFS data traffic.