Using NFS with ASM…

Combining NFS with ASM has come up in several conversations I’ve had recently, both online and real world. Since I no longer believe in coincidence I figured it was a message that I should take a look at it.

Anyone who has ever faked ASM disks using “dd” will recognize the approach. It works OK, and solves one of my issue with VirtualBox not supporting shared disks.

Please, please, please don’t think I’m recommending this. I’m not. NFS works just fine on it’s own. It’s just useful for me as a some time Mac user because VirtualBox and VMware Fusion don’t do shared disks, so RAC with ASM is a pain on them.

ASM with ASMLib or Raw Devices?

I’ve been trying to figure out if it’s better to run ASM on Linux using ASMLib or raw devices. Some of the Oracle documentation claims ASMLib gives better performance that raw devices with 10g Release 2, while other sources claim it only affects candidate disk discovery time…

Whilst setting up a test I wrote this article:

ASM using ASMLib and Raw Devices

I’m sure the configuration information will be useful to others, but my first performance test only convinced me that using VMware on my kit at home is pointless for performance tests. You don’t say!!! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…