I shouldn’t be writing that all is well on the Oracle front.
Just now two of the Oracle servers froze with database problems. The DBA tells me that they have block corrupts which he hasn’t seen in five years of running the things.
More later.
{edit}
Both instances were terminated by PMON due to unreadable
logfile or spfile. The errors look like this;
ORA-00471: DBWR process terminated with error
PMON: terminating instance due to error 471
Instance terminated by PMON, pid = 26973
ORA-00470: LGWR process terminated with error
PMON: terminating instance due to error 470
Instance terminated by PMON, pid = 25260
One instance is a 9.2.0.4 database, the other a 10.2.0.1 database, on separate virtual machines.
For Oracle 9i: Restore from backup.…
For Oracle 10g: Resetlogs by:
startup mount
recover database until cancel;
recover database until cancel; (a message ‘media recovery complete’ will appear)
alter database open resetlogs;
We are viewing this as an unfortunate incident at the moment but will keep monitoring this closely.
February 27, 2007 at 5:44 am
We are looking at running Oracle on a Vmware/HA setup, so I am curious as to whether you have identified the cause of your Oracle database corruption and whether it was caused by the HA failover.
I also see that you are running Oracle DB on Vmware for production. We have read that Oracle will not support Oracle DB on Vmware in a production environment. Have you heard the same?
March 1, 2007 at 1:10 am
The cause for the problem was most likely a memory problem where the VM would start swapping at such a rate that the CPU was maxing out 100%. If that situation holds for more than say half an hour than processes start to behave out of the ordinary.
After upping the memory on the two most utilized servers to 6GB (both with 2 vCPU) the problems have gone. It could be necessary for us to up the CPU to 4 vCPU but it seems to hold, even through the most busy times.
Regarding support I don’t have any specific information. I know that Oracle doesn’t recognize VMWare as a means of saving on CPU licenses as you have to license the number of CPU’s in a host. We do keep some physical servers for when we should end up in a support discussion with any software supplier to replay a problem on a physical machine.
March 23, 2007 at 9:15 pm
ok, i should have searched for this post. it answers my question to you as well