Hi,
First my apologies for any question that may seem useless or stupid but if I know very well ONTAP for a long time , I must admit I have no experience on Oracle VM 🙂
IHAC who use OVM 3.2.6 to run Oracle Linux machines with Oracles DBs on it.
It is connected to a NetApp ONTAP 8.0.2 7-mode system using FC SAN protocol and the standard Oracle Plugin (The ONTAP version will be upgraded soon to 8.1 or 8.2)
The OVM servers are connected to an IBM storage as well.
Question 1:
Is there any impact installing the NetApp Plugin on existing OVM Server with existing VM (Does it change some drivers or settings or anything with an impact ?)
Question 2:
Can VM migrate seamlessly from Oracle standard Storage Array plugin to NetApp plugin ?
Question 3:
The customer needs to backup its DBs using NetApp snapshots.
Usually, I use Snapdrive and SMO/SnapCreator to resolve this. I've seen mention of Snapdrive and SMO with OVM in docs and TRs. But looking at Interoperability matrix and asking to NetApp team, it seems not supported (I've even been said it was not working).
Unless someone can say me it works, we'll have to do the backups without SMO and Snapdrive. So we can script snapshots creation with or without Hot Backup, since Oracle now supports Crash Consistent backups.
So my 3rd question is not about Oracle consistency but ext3 filesystem consistency.
If I understand well the plugin, we can create consistent snapshot using the plugin features. Does this apply only to repositories or can we use it on physical disks directly (if we use RDM-style disks to store DBs: one lun for DB, one for ArcLog, one for CTRL Files, etc) ?
The underlined question is : Can the NetApp plugin help the customer to implement consistent snapshots of its Oracle DBs at the filesystem level ? Or will we need to quiesce Oracle DB, create a snap on the FAS hoping it is file-system consistent, then doing the same on Arc Logs lun...
Thank you for any answer that will help me.
Best regards,
Regis
