To configure the physical servers that host the PROD and snapshot database VMs:
- Enable the following BIOS settings for the PowerEdge servers:
- Memory: Default options
- Processor: Default options
- System Profile: Performance (the nondefault option)
- Create a single virtual disk in a RAID 1 configuration with two local disks (SSDs or HDDs) per server to install the bare-metal operating system (ESXi 7.0).
- Install ESXi 7.0 by using the Dell EMC customized ISO image (Dell version A00, build number 16324942). Download the image from Dell Technologies Online Support at VMware ESXi 7.x.
- Create two VMs for the PROD Oracle RAC database, one on each of the PowerEdge R740 servers, and two VMs for the snapshot Oracle RAC database, one on each of the PowerEdge R640 servers.
- Configure, monitor, and maintain the ESXi host, virtual networking, and the VM by using the VMware vSphere web client and VCSA, which is deployed as a VM on the management server.
- Zone two dual-port 32 Gb/s HBAs—four initiators in total—and configure these HBAs with the PowerStore T front-end FC ports for high bandwidth, load-balancing, and highly available SAN traffic.
- Set LUN Queue Depth to 128 for Emulex HBAs that are used in both PROD and snapshot servers.
Multipath configuration
We configured multipathing on the ESXi 7.0 host according to the following best practices:
- Use vSphere Native Multipathing (NMP) as the multipathing software.
- Retain the default selection of round-robin for the native path selection policy (PSP) on the PowerStore T volumes that are presented to the ESXi host.
- Change the NMP round-robin path switching frequency from the default value of 1,000 I/O packets to 1 packet.