Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 SP1 for Oracle RAC Administrator"s Guide (5900-1512, April 2011)

the mount point or not. In order to determine this, the monitor function does
operations such as mount table scans or runs statfs equivalents.
With intelligent monitoring framework (IMF), VCS supports intelligent resource
monitoring in addition to the poll-based monitoring. Process-based and
Mount-based agents are IMF-aware. IMF is an extension to the VCS agent
framework. You can enable or disable the intelligent monitoring functionality of
the VCS agents that are IMF-aware.
See “How intelligent resource monitoring works” on page 38.
See “Enabling and disabling intelligent resource monitoring for agents manually”
on page 102.
Poll-based monitoring can consume a fairly large percentage of system resources
such as CPU and memory on systems with a huge number of resources. This not
only affects the performance of running applications, but also places a limit on
how many resources an agent can monitor efficiently.
However, with IMF-based monitoring you can either eliminate poll-based
monitoring completely or reduce its frequency. For example, for process offline
and online monitoring, you can completely avoid the need for poll-based
monitoring with IMF-based monitoring for processes. Similarly for vxfs mounts,
you can eliminate the poll-based monitoring with IMF monitoring enabled. Such
reduction in monitor footprint will make more system resources available for
other applications to consume.
Note: Intelligent Monitoring Framework for mounts is supported only for the
VxFS, CFS, and NFS mount types.
With IMF-enabled agents, VCS will be able to effectively monitor larger number
of resources.
Thus, intelligent monitoring has the following benefits over poll-based monitoring:
■ Provides faster notification of resource state changes
■ Reduces VCS system utilization due to reduced monitor function footprint
■ Enables VCS to effectively monitor a large number of resources
Consider enabling IMF for an agent in either of the following cases:
■ You have a large number of process resources or mount resources under VCS
control.
■ You have any of the agents that are IMF-aware.
See the Veritas Cluster Server Bundled Agents Reference Guide for details on
whether your bundled agent is IMF-aware.
37Overview of Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC
Component products and processes of SF Oracle RAC