Feb
5
Future of OCFS2
Filed Under Linux, Oracle, Technical | 4 Comments
At the company where I’m working right now, I’m part of an architecture effort to come up with our standard design for RAC on Linux across the firm. There will be dozens or possibly hundreds of deployments globally using the design we settle on.
We’re internally debating whether or not we should include OCFS2 in this design right now, and I’m curious if anyone has arguments one way or the other to share. Our standard design on Solaris does utilize a cluster filesystem and we would welcome a similar design, but there are some concerns about the readiness, stability and future of OCFS2.
OCFS2 is being considered for these four use cases:
- database binaries (vs local files or NFS)
- diag top (11g) or admin tree (10g) (vs local files or NFS)
- archived logs
- backups
Other files will be stored in ASM.
I have seen mention in blogs such as http://bigdaveroberts.wordpress.com/ of something called ASMFS in 11gR2 and I’m wondering – will this feature (if included) have any impact on Oracle’s commitment to OCFS2 development? Could Oracle conceivably develop a whole new cluster filesystem and put their full weight behind it as they did for ASM storage, leaving OCFS2 as a lower priority for new features and improvements? Has Oracle demonstrated significant commitment to OCFS2 development and support in the past, and is this a mature enough technology for wide-scale deployment?
Just looking for opinions. :)
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[...] responding to Jeremy’s message on Oracle-L, it got me reading his blog. On one post, he asks if OCFS2 has a future given the rumored introduction of “ASMfs“, and if [...]
Because you have hundreds of systems to configure to standard, I would “avoid” anything that is either not solid or may change. And for that reason, I don’t think I would move forward with an OCFS2 solution.
I have not seen a lot of advances in the last few years. And we do see advances in other areas by Oracle, and other clustering filesystems from other vendors.
I love OCFS to “get the job done” with limited enterprise impact. Not sure if that is the direction you want to take.
You should also consider ZFS (fs coming from sun and available as a fuse module on linux) which could replace both OCFS and ASM if Oracle would decide to get and use the best technologies coming from their new acquisition (sun)…
ZFS is not a cluster filesystem – you can’t access it simultaneously from two hosts. It does have a lot of cool features though. I’m also a little geeked about btrfs – in fact it has many similar features to zfs.
In the end I recommended that the company use OCFS2, but primarily for business rather than technical reasons. They already had a standard design and extensive scripting for RAC on Solaris, utilizing a cluster filesystem. There is no cluster filesystem available for datafiles on Linux besides OCFS2. I felt that OCFS2 was a technically viable option and it would be similar architecturally to their Solaris environments – allowing them to leverage past Solaris scripting and design work to the maximum extent.