Tim Hall sent me email to point me to a recent step-by-step install tip he produced for Oracle11g with NAS storage (NFS). In the email he asked me if I had any experience with the new Oracle11g Direct NFS (DNFS) feature. The answer is, yes, I have a lot of DNFS experience as I hinted to with my blog post entitled Manly Men Only Deploy Oracle With Fibre Channel Part VI. Introducing Oracle11g Direct NFS. If I haven’t plugged the “Manly Man” series lately I am doing so again now. I think anyone interested in storage with an Oracle slant would take interest. The full series of Manly Man posts can be found easily through my index of CFS/NFS/ASM Topics as well as this entry about a recent Oracle 300GB TPC-H result. That TPC-H result is very interesting-especially if you are trying to get out of SAN/DAS/NAS rehab. Yes, that was supposed to be humorous.
Back to the point. Here is the link to Tim’s (very good) step-by-step Oracle Database 11g RAC on Linux setup for NFS environments. I especially liked the mention of Direct NFS since I think it is very important technology as my jointly-authored Oracle Whitepaper on the topic should attest.
Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage 
I havent got much experience with NFS, the only time I had touch with RAC on NFS was in a customer site who uses NetAPP for RAC shared filesystem.
So how’s NFS performance compared with CFS/RAW/ASM?
Cheers
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LSC
Still searching for an Oracle 11g utilizing NAS (NFS) storage document that describes real world examples with DNFS that take advantage of multiple NICs. Sure, the concept is easy when describing traffic over a single NIC, but we wouldn’t implement this in production. What is needed is a doc incorporating a discussion around Netapp vifs, linux o/s NIC channel bonding, and Oracle DNFS options. Oracle has published stats supporting multiple NIC paths to a NFS server for increased performance/redundancy. If your NAS is a Netapp, forget the vifs, (or trunking gigE NICs), because the Oracle oranfstab file wants individual NFS NIC IP’s/hostnames. There are also NFS export/share implications to this, for example, do we now need to share the NFS data out to each individual NIC on the RAC node if more than one used in a non-o/s-channel bonding fashion?
My point is this – not much documentation available yet for 11g DNFS setup using multiple redundant NICs on both the RAC node and the NAS device.
Thanks, and great site.
bkb,
My follow-up to this great comment deserves a blog entry. I’ll see what I can do.
Come and ask the question at my session at OOW 🙂