The following figure shows the logical architecture of the Oracle RAC database environment. The figure includes the PowerFlex compute layer with an Oracle RAC database, the PowerFlex storage layer, and the PowerFlex management components.
Figure 3. Oracle RAC architecture on two-layer PowerFlex
The two-layer PowerFlex cluster consists of:
- PowerFlex Compute-only node – Three PowerFlex R6525 servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 operating system. The PowerFlex SDC component installed on each server. The Oracle 21c RAC database is deployed on these three servers. The SDC provides LUNs to be used as application storage.
- PowerFlex Storage node – Four PowerFlex R640 servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 operating system. Each server is attached with SAS SSDs disks. The PowerFlex SDS component is installed on each server which contributes to the PowerFlex storage. The role of the SDS is to perform back-end I/O operations as requested by SDC.
- PowerFlex management components – Three PowerFlex R640 servers running ESXi 7.x as the hypervisor, hosts multiple PowerFlex management virtual machines (VMs), as described in the following points:
- VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) deployed as a VM.
- PowerFlex management platform installer VM. The installer VM is only used during the installation of the PowerFlex management cluster to deploy the containerized services required for the PowerFlex management platform.
- PowerFlex management platform cluster requires three VMs to be deployed. PowerFlex management platform OVA to be used for deploying these VMs.
- Network requirements such as Ethernet switching capable of L3 routing and supports trunking, L2 VLAN ID and tagging, VLAN names and numbers, and Port-channel with link aggregation control protocol (LACP) are met.
- NTP is implemented by chronyd daemon to synchronize the system clock for ESXi hosts, VMs, and all the bare metal servers with NTP server. For more information, see RHEL 8 Chrony to configure NTP
- DNS and PTR records are set up and properly configured.