Best Practices Dell EMC SC Series: Oracle Best Practices Abstract Best practices, configuration options, and sizing guidelines for Dell EMC™ SC Series storage in Fibre Channel environments when deploying Oracle®. May 2020 CML1114 Revisions Revisions Date Description January 2012 Initial release April 2012 Content and format change July 2013 Added ORION information provided by Copilot April 2015 Content and format change July 2017 Major rewrite. Made document agnostic with respect to Dell EMC SC series arrays. Format changes. August 2018 Content changes for preallocation May 2020 Changed setting of port down Acknowledgments Author: Mark Tomczik The information in this publication is provided “as is.” Dell Inc. makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 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[5/12/2020] [Best Practices] [CML1114] 2 Dell EMC SC Series: Oracle Best Practices | CML1114 Table of contents Table of contents Revisions............................................................................................................................................................................. 2 Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................................................... 2 Table of contents ................................................................................................................................................................ 3 Executive summary ............................................................................................................................................................. 6 How to use this document................................................................................................................................................... 6 Audience ............................................................................................................................................................................. 6 Prerequisites ....................................................................................................................................................................... 6 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................... 7 1.1 Manageability ...................................................................................................................................................... 7 1.2 High availability ................................................................................................................................................... 7 1.3 Performance ....................................................................................................................................................... 7 2 Fibre Channel connectivity ........................................................................................................................................... 9 2.1 Zoning ................................................................................................................................................................. 9 2.1.1 Soft (WWN) zoning ............................................................................................................................................. 9 2.1.2 Hard (port) zoning ............................................................................................................................................. 13 2.2 QLogic settings ................................................................................................................................................. 13 2.2.1 Server FC HBA BIOS settings .......................................................................................................................... 13 2.2.2 Server FC HBA driver settings: timeouts and queue depth ............................................................................. 15 3 SC Series array .......................................................................................................................................................... 16 3.1 SC Series features ........................................................................................................................................... 16 3.2 Benefits of deploying Oracle on SC Series storage ......................................................................................... 17 3.3 SC Series back-end connections ..................................................................................................................... 17 3.4 Virtual port mode .............................................................................................................................................. 17 3.5 Fault domains in virtual port mode ................................................................................................................... 18 3.6 Redundancy for SC Series front-end connections ........................................................................................... 19 3.7 Creating server objects in SC Series arrays .................................................................................................... 19 3.8 Disk pools and disk folders ............................................................................................................................... 21 3.9 Storage types .................................................................................................................................................... 22 3.10 Data page ......................................................................................................................................................... 23 3.11 Tiered storage ................................................................................................................................................... 24 3.12 Tier redundancy and RAID ............................................................................................................................... 25 3.13 Tier redundancy and media type ...................................................................................................................... 27 3.14 RAID stripe width .............................................................................................................................................. 27 3.15 RAID penalty ..................................................................................................................................................... 30 3.16 Data Progression .............................................................................................................................................. 31 3 Dell EMC SC Series: Oracle Best Practices | CML1114 Table of contents 3.17 Data Progression pressure reports ................................................................................................................... 33 3.18 Volume distribution reports ............................................................................................................................... 34 3.19 Storage profiles ................................................................................................................................................. 35 3.20 Snapshot profiles .............................................................................................................................................. 39 3.21 Snapshots (Replays) ........................................................................................................................................ 41 3.22 Consistent snapshot profiles and Oracle .......................................................................................................... 46 3.23 Using Data Progression and snapshots ........................................................................................................... 48 3.24 SC Series cache settings ................................................................................................................................. 48 3.25 Creating volumes (LUNs) in DSM .................................................................................................................... 49 3.25.1 Scanning devices in PowerPath environments ............................................................................................ 53 3.25.2 Scanning devices in non-PowerPath environments ..................................................................................... 53 3.26 Preallocating storage ........................................................................................................................................ 54 3.27 Volume cache settings ..................................................................................................................................... 57 3.28 Data reduction with deduplication and compression ........................................................................................ 58 4