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The Dell PowerStore is a 2U two-node dual socket Intel® Xeon® platform. It is an active/active configuration where both nodes (controllers) can serve data to the volumes. However, only one node can own a volume at a time. For this validation, Dell engineers manually configured the volumes with node affinity to provide the best performance possible for running Oracle database workloads. PowerStore node affinity provides the load balancing of the volumes created on the array to maximize performance. In later versions of the PowerStore operating system, the node affinity is automated during the volume creation process.
PowerStore has four Fibre Channel front-end I/O ports per node for storage connectivity. To maximize storage performance, all four front-end I/O ports on each PowerStore node are zoned to all PowerEdge HBA ports. The following table provides an overview of a PowerStore 1000T model.
PowerStore has many features such as volume performance policy, volume group, and snapshot. The volume performance policy consists of three priority levels: High, Medium, and Low. This policy controls the quality of service for the data path to the volume. The default priority setting for newly created volumes is medium.
The volume group feature provides users with the ability to snapshot more than one volume at the same time. Oracle requires all volumes belonging to the database to be snapshotted atomically for a functional snapshot of an Oracle database. Depending on the business requirements, Oracle snapshots can be used to create clones for dev/test or other purposes.
This validated design includes four storage volume groups. This design was to allow granularity for the database administrators to only snapshot what is necessary, therefore saving capacity. Data in the TEMP tablespace is not required when snapshotting the database and resides in its own storage volume group. Even though, a single instance database was tested, a separate ASM disk group named “GRID” was created for the Oracle Restart option. This ASM disk group is not required for a functional database snapshot; therefore, it has its own storage volume group. The following list describes the four storage volume groups:
The VM_OS storage volume group has one volume configured with the PowerStore volume performance policy of medium (default). This volume group was for the Linux operating system.
The VM_GRID storage volume group contains three volumes configured with the PowerStore volume performance policy of medium (default). Since Oracle Restart was configured, a separate ASM disk group was created for Grid Infrastructure and the ASM registry file.
The VM_DB1 storage volume group contains twelve volumes. This volume group consists of the following ASM disk groups:
Each of these ASM disk groups has four volumes. The DATA_DG volumes were configured with the PowerStore volume performance policy of medium. The REDO_DG volumes were configured with the PowerStore volume performance policy of high. The FRA_DG volumes were configured with the PowerStore volume performance policy of low.
The VM_TEMP storage volume group has one volume and was configured with the PowerStore volume performance policy of medium (default). Since the temp tablespace is not needed for database snapshots, a dedicated storage volume group was created.
The following table provides an overview of the volume groups created for this validation.
For detailed PowerStore best practices and features, see Storage Best Practices.
In addition, the PowerStore also includes Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) plugins to allow users to gain performance insights of the PowerStore from the OEM user interface.