PowerPath vs Multipath - which one to use

Hm....
It all depend. They are doing the same thing but why use powerpath and not multipath or why use multipath and not powerpath?

In case that you don't know what they are, they are managing redundant paths from Linux OS to storage. It means that you have multiple paths to same LUN on storage and these software are responsible for that.

From functionality point I personally think that PowerPath has more options to manipulate with paths and LUN's. Of course this is my opinion and it's not objective one. From my working experience, I had much less trouble using PowerPath than multipath. By using I think of scanning paths, adding new LUNs, removing LUNs, displaying options, etc.
Probably someone will disagree with me.

From vendor point of view PowerPath is EMC property and if you want support for it you have to licence it. You can downloaded it, installed it, use it, but if something happens and you need support, you will have to pay licence for it.
On other hand multipath is part of Linux and support for it comes with support for your distro. So from financial point of view, if you are already paying for support for your Linux distro (RH, SLES) there is no need to buy PowerPath when you already have all functionality in multipath.

So if budget is not issue, then I would buy PowerPath but... that licence money could be redirected is some other licence for some product that is not already implemented in Linux OS or some new project.

Number of cores on HP DL 560 g8 on Linux explained!

Recently we both new HP servers! HP DL 560p gen8! Brilliant machine! Lots of RAM, lots of CPU power!

We installed SLES 11.3 x64 to give it a try!

I knew how many CPU sockets are they but I didn't know how many cores are there per socket so I run following command

 # cat /proc/cpuinfo

and saw that number of last cpu have number

processor       : 63

My thinking was this: Ok, so we have 64 cores, that is 64/4=16 cores per sockets!!!
Pretty impressive, don't you think?!?

I wanted to read more about CPU on Internet.

CPU is

model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-4640 0 @ 2.40GHz

http://ark.intel.com/products/64603/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-4640-20M-Cache-2_40-GHz-8_00-GTs-Intel-QPI

But there was that this is 8 core CPU.

# of Cores 8

Hm..... something is not right here.

Think that maybe, just maybe Intel make mistake and that in fact this is 16 core CPU is highly unlikely so this must be Linux issue.

After some reading I realise this. In processor info there was this parameter

# of Threads 16

And 16*4=64.


Little explanation first:
 core vs thread

A thread is a single line of commands that are getting processed. A core is the physical hardware that works on the thread. In general a processor can only work on one thread per core, CPUs with hyper threading can work on up to two threads per core.
 
So this CPU has 16 treads for 8 cores and Linux kernel see this as number of cores, that is he see 16 cores instead of 8 cores. So Linux is reading number of threads!!!

How to get actual number of cores from CLI?

Number of sockets:
#cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep "physical id"|sort|uniq
physical id     : 0
physical id     : 1
physical id     : 2
physical id     : 3


Number of cores per socket
#cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep "cpu cores"|uniq
cpu cores       : 8
So 4 sockets with 8 cores per sockets equals 32 cores.
 

Settings for EMC Netwoker agent for backup Oracle DB on Linux

After you installed Networker agent for Oracle it is time to check out if if works.

Backup of  Oracle DB through EMC Networker is created using Oracle RMAN backup scripts.

For backup to work as it should, you need to make this additional settings.

1. You have to link libraries

#su - oracle
#cd $ORACLE_HOME
#cd lib#ls -la |grep libobk.so ;

#ls /usr/lib |grep libnsrora;
#ln -s /usr/lib/libnsrora.so libobk.so 
#ls -la |grep libobk

2. Patching 
This step is usually needed.
To test if you need this step do following:

server:/usr/sbin # ./nsrdasv43592:nsrdasv: usage:
72583:nsrdasv:  nsrdasv -z config_file [-T app_type] [savegrp_opts]
75189:nsrdasv: The configuration file is not provided for the ad hoc backup.

If you get this message, then you do not need to do the patching.

In case that you get different message, you should apply patch.
Patch is downloaded from EMC. You will get bundle of folders for different OS. Find your OS.
In that folder you will have two files:

-nsrdasv
-nsrdasv.notstripped

Now apply patch.

#cd location_of_patch_files
#ls -la /usr/sbin/ |grep nsrdasv
#mv /usr/sbin/nsrdasv /usr/sbin/nsrdasv.old
#cp nsrdasv.notstripped /usr/sbin/nsrdasv
 #chmod +x /usr/sbin/nsrdasv

Test it
server:/usr/sbin # ./nsrdasv

If  your output is like this

43592:nsrdasv: usage:
72583:nsrdasv:  nsrdasv -z config_file [-T app_type] [savegrp_opts]
75189:nsrdasv: The configuration file is not provided for the ad hoc backup.

then you are ready to do backup of Oracle DB.

In 99% of case with Networker Oracle DB backup issues above settings were problem.


 

Installation of EMC Netwoker agent for backup Oracle DB on Linux

In one of previous posts I explained how to install EMC Networker agent for backup file system on Linux. Same package dependencies are applied here. To be honest I never installed package for backup Oracle DB without previously installing Networker agent for backup file system. 
To backup up Oracle Database with EMC Networker software you have to download and install following package:
-Download nmda12_linux_x86_64.tar.gz presuming that you have 64bit Linux OS.
-untar it

When you do this, you will now have following files

 # ls
32-bit
LGTO_METAFILE_linux86w_nmda.mf
lgtonmda-1.2.0.1-1.x86_64.rpm 
sd_products.res
nmda12_linux_x86_64.tar.gz

Install lgtonmda-1.2.0.1-1.x86_64.rpm 
#rpm -ivh lgtonmda-1.2.0.1-1.x86_64.rpm 


No additional services will be installed on system.

Your backup and database administrator should confirm that backup of Oracle database are going OK or not going OK.
 

iLo2 deafult password on HP C7000 blade chassis

In case that you are searching for default iLo password on your HP C7000 blade chassis....

... it is located on iLo module so to get the password you have to get iLo module out. When you do this, all lights will go red, don't worry this is OK. Flip module around and you will see DNS name,user name and default password. Put iLo module back in chassis, lights will go green again and you now can approach blade chassis through iLo.
Why I am writing this? Because before on c7000 chassis this iLo default password was on outside of chassis so you did not have to anything will iLo module.

I hope this will save you some time.