HP Serviceguard Storage Management Suite A.03.02 Release Notes (March 2012)

ODM Must be Used for Oracle RAC Data on CFS File Systems
ODM - Oracle Disk Manager is included in all SG SMS bundles. ODM must be used for Oracle
RAC data on CFS file systems. ODM can also be used for Oracle standalone databases with data
on VxVM volumes with VxFS file systems, or with data on CVM/CFS. ODM is not supported for
use on file systems on LVM logical volumes. ODM improves the I/O performance for Oracle
databases with data on VxFS and CFS file systems. The performance approaches that of Oracle
data on raw disks.
Dirty Region Logging (DRL) for Mirrored Volumes
If a system failure occurs while mirrored volumes are in use, the mirrors will recover and clean up
any writes that were in progress when the system failed. The Dirty Region Logging (DRL) feature
tracks writes that are in progress to reduce the recovery effort after a system failure. Without DRL,
the entire volume must be recovered, because there is no way to determine which blocks had writes
in progress at the time of the system failure.
The recovery operation is I/O intensive and can be time consuming, depending on the number of
volumes and how large they are. In a clustered environment the IO performance of multiple nodes
using the same volume will be impacted during recovery.
HP strongly recommends that you use DRL with mirrored data volumes in a clustered environment
to enable faster volume recovery. However, Oracle database volumes should be configured without
DRL, because the Oracle database application keeps its own logs and does not require VxVM to
maintain logs. For information on DRL and the Veritas™ SmartSync Recovery Accelerator, see the
Veritas™ Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide, HP-UX 11i v3, 5.0.1.
HP-UX Operating Environment Upgrade Limitations
When you purchase an HP Serviceguard Storage Management Suite (SG SMS) Operating
Environment (OE) bundle, the SG SMS software is provided on one DVD and the HP-UX OE (Data
Center - DCOE, or High Availability - HAOE) is provided on a separate DVD.
The software provided on the SG SMS DVD relies on products and filesets that are provided on
the OE DVD, including HP Serviceguard and the Veritas Storage Foundation products. Each SG
SMS OE version relies on specific versions of HP Serviceguard and Enterprise Cluster Master Toolkit
(ECMT) that can change with new HP-UX OE releases.
The software on the SG SMS DVD is installed using swinstall. If an HP-UX OE is installed on
your system and you attempt to install a SG SMS OE version that is not supported with the versions
of Serviceguard and ECMT included with the HP-UX OE, swinstall will detect the incompatible
software and the installation will fail.
The software on the HP-UX OE DVD is installed using update-ux. If a SG SMS OE bundle is
installed on your system and you attempt to install or upgrade to an HP-UX OE version that includes
Serviceguard and ECMT versions that are not supported with the SG SMS OE bundle, update-ux
will detect the incompatible software.
To avoid these potential installation conflicts, always upgrade the HP-UX OE and the SG SMS OE
bundle simultaneously as described in “Updating HP-UX and SG SMS Simultaneously” (page 31).
If the HP-UX OE upgrade you want to install is not supported with the Serviceguard and ECMT
versions in the SG SMS bundle that is installed on your system, you must upgrade to an SG SMS
OE bundle that is supported with the HP-UX OE version you want to install.
See “Compatibility Information and Installation Requirements” (page 20) for more information on
bundle upgrades.
Known Problems
This section lists known problems in the HP Serviceguard Storage Management Suite version
A.03.02 for HP-UX 11i v3 at the time of publication. This list is subject to change without notice.
Known Problems 45