| |

Persistent raw devices for Oracle RAC with iSCSI

If you’re into Oracle RAC over iSCSI, you should be rather content – this configuration is a simple and supported. However, working with some iSCSI target devices, order and naming is not consistent between both Oracle nodes.

The simple solutions are by using OCFS2 labels, or by using ASM, however, if you decide to place your voting disks and cluster registry disks on raw devices, you are to face a problem.

iSCSI on RHEL5:

There are few guides, but the simple method is this:

  1. Configure mapping in your iSCSI target device
  2. Start the iscsid and iscsi services on your Linux
    • service iscsi start
    • service iscsid start
    • chkconfig iscsi on
    • chkconfig iscsid on
  3. Run “iscsiadm -m discovery -t st -p target-IP
  4. Run “iscsiadm -m node -L all
  5. Edit /etc/iscsi/send_targets and add to it the IP address of the target for automatic login on restart

You need to configure partitioning according to the requirements.

If you are to setup OCFS2 volumes for the voting and for the cluster registry, there should not be a problem as long as you use labels, however, if you require raw volumes, you need to change udev to create your raw devices for you.

On a system with persistent disk naming, follow this process, however, on a system with changing disk names (every reboot names are different), the process can become a bit more complex.

First, detect your scsi_id for each device. While names might change upon reboots, scsi_ids do not.

scsi_id -g -u -s /block/sdc

Replace sda with the device name you are looking for. Notice that /block/sda is a reference to /sys/block/sdc

Use the scsi_id generated by that to create the raw devices. Edit /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules and find line 298. Add a line below with the following contents:

KERNEL==”sd*[0-9]”, ENV{ID_SERIAL}==”14f70656e66696c000000000004000000010f00000e000000″, SYMLINK+=”disk/by-id/$env{ID_BUS}-$env{ID_SERIAL}-part%n” ACTION==”add” RUN+=”/bin/raw /dev/raw/raw%n %N”

Things to notice:

  1. The ENV{ID_SERIAL} is the same scsi_id obtained earlier
  2. This line will create a raw device in the name of raw and number in /dev/raw for each partition
  3. If you want to differtiate between two (or more) disks, change the name from raw to an aduqate name, like “crsa”, “crsb”, etc, for example:

KERNEL==”sd*[0-9]”, ENV{ID_SERIAL}==”14f70656e66696c000000000005000000010f00000e000000″, SYMLINK+=”disk/by-id/$env{ID_BUS}-$env{ID_SERIAL}-part%n” ACTION==”add” RUN+=”/bin/raw /dev/raw/crs%n %N”

Following these changes, run “udevtrigger” to reload the rules. Be advised that “udevtrigger” might reset network connection.

Similar Posts

2 Comments

    1. For RHEL4 this goes a bit differently.
      udev is way limited, and you will probably not be able to use it. Assuming you have defined iSCSI where applies and it’s working, there should be no reason for it to be non-persistent.
      Assuming it’s persistent, use /etc/sysconfig/raw (check the example) and the ‘rawdevices’ service to fixate the raw devices to the ‘sd’ device names.

      Does it help?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.