Author: paulmoen

Bizgres on EC2

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Amazon and others already have release images with PostgreSQL installed, however as part of getting some datamining software built on EC2 I have run thru the build of Bizgres.

Most of the time was spent getting java installed properly. I will release a recipe soon as mentioned in that post.

On the Openfiler front I have read some more documentation, wiki and forum posts and will give it another crack on the weekend.
I know there are bunch of people interested in seeing Oracle RAC on EC2 a reality.

There are several other options to getting shared disk available for OCFS2 to see and use. I will only explore those if the problems with Openfiler are intractable.

Update:
The Bizgres build was good I have run through the IVP (Instance Verification Program) without issue, see the details here.

Have Fun
Paul

Openfiler fun

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I was working on the Openfiler step over the past couple of days.
Whilst I was able to get the Openfiler image working, I was unable to create any logical volumes or get it to see any physical volumes. It was looking like the proverbial business buzzword “it’s a Show Stopper”.

Hint: whilst pvcreate and vgcreate worked, they were unusable by Openfiler.

I googled and came up with very little apart from needing to learn more about Xen and vxd block devices.
I gave it another go (just before starting this post) and bingo, I found a bunch of potential resolution articles.
The Openfiler on Xen wiki (RFTM whoops)
A rpath forum post on handling xvd block devices.
Plus it looks like someone was doing something similar with a HA cluster setup whilst not as crazy as Openfiler on Xen flavoured virtual instance sitting on top of Amazon hardware ala EC2.

I have a week of leave to play with this and get Oracle RAC on EC2 a reality… in amongst some kids parties and a Burt Bacharach concert.

If you have any ideas or thoughts on Openfiler on Xen, feel free to contribute.

Editor note: Slight change pvcreate and vgcreate were working, lvcreate never was.

Update: Success. See the sequel to this article.

Have Fun

Paul

Oracle OCFS2 clusterware install on Amazon EC2

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Like I mentioned in my previous posts. I am using Jeff Hunter’s Oracle RAC build guide to get an Oracle RAC install on Amazon EC2.

I have been testing various steps which are independent on the other steps in the guide.

So last night I played around with getting Oracle OCFS2 (Oracle Cluster File system) installed onto a CentOS 4 EC2 image. This is step 16 in the build guide.

Downloading and/or reading the User Guide and reviewing the FAQ are also a good option.

Downloaded the appropriate RPMs from Oracle’s website and they installed fine.

I am time constrained, but I wanted to attempt the console (using X windows) and also the o2cb_ctl to create the configuration required.
The Oracle documentation for OCFS2 has some man pages for the various tools which can also been installed.

Note: Amazon EC2 is running Xen. uname -a was saying it was SMP, however only the single processor RPM (EL) worked, which is fair enough, given that is what Amazon specifies that i.e. a single virtual 1.7 Ghz CPU.

I have attached the screen dump of what I did.

I have made an image of Openfiler and got that running. So the next step is to fire up that, get OCFS2 running and seeing the shared disk provided by that.
Stay tuned…

Have Fun

Paul


[root@domU-12-31-36-00-30-A2 mnt]# rpm -Uvh ocfs2-2.6.9-42.EL-1.2.4-2.i686.rpm \
> ocfs2-tools-1.2.4-1.i386.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
  1:ocfs2-tools            ########################################### [ 50%]
  2:ocfs2-2.6.9-42.EL      ########################################### [100%]


[root@domU-12-31-36-00-30-A2 mnt]# /etc/init.d/o2cb configure
Configuring the O2CB driver.

This will configure the on-boot properties of the O2CB driver.
The following questions will determine whether the driver is loaded on
boot.  The current values will be shown in brackets ('[]').  Hitting
 without typing an answer will keep that current value.  Ctrl-C
will abort.

Load O2CB driver on boot (y/n) [n]: y
Cluster to start on boot (Enter "none" to clear) [ocfs2]:
Specify heartbeat dead threshold (>=7) [7]: 61
Specify network idle timeout in ms (>=5000) [10000]:
Specify network keepalive delay in ms (>=1000) [5000]:
Specify network reconnect delay in ms (>=2000) [2000]:
Writing O2CB configuration: OK
Loading module "configfs": OK
Mounting configfs filesystem at /sys/kernel/config: OK
Loading module "ocfs2_nodemanager": OK
Loading module "ocfs2_dlm": OK
Loading module "ocfs2_dlmfs": OK
Creating directory '/dlm': OK
Mounting ocfs2_dlmfs filesystem at /dlm: OK
Checking O2CB cluster configuration : Failed
[root@domU-12-31-36-00-30-A2 mnt]# ps -ef|grep ocds
root      2922  2732  0 08:20 ttyp1    00:00:00 grep ocds
[root@domU-12-31-36-00-30-A2 mnt]# ps -ef|grep ocfs
root      2924  2732  0 08:20 ttyp1    00:00:00 grep ocfs
[root@domU-12-31-36-00-30-A2 mnt]# uptime
08:20:43 up 27 min,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
[root@domU-12-31-36-00-30-A2 mnt]# /etc/init.d/o2cb status
Module "configfs": Loaded
Filesystem "configfs": Mounted
Module "ocfs2_nodemanager": Loaded
Module "ocfs2_dlm": Loaded
Module "ocfs2_dlmfs": Loaded
Filesystem "ocfs2_dlmfs": Mounted
Checking O2CB cluster ocfs2: Offline

Getting Oracle installed on EC2 using CentOS4

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Like I mentioned in my first post. My aim is to get an Oracle RAC cluster running on Amazon EC2.

I hope to use this setup as a training ground and see the process of installing and getting Oracle RAC running as a specific to EC2 it will useful in a wider sense.

I choose to go with CentOS 4.4 which is basically Red Hat Enterprise minus some bits. It is not certified by Oracle.

Luckily someone had already done the hard yards on getting an CentOS image created as a public image file.
So I copied my local cookies file and used wget to download the Oracle 10.2G install from Oracle.

The bandwidth between Amazon and Oracle made this a quick download and reasonably cheap.

I have gone off using the GUI installer over remote links, so I am reasonably comfortable with the silent installer using a response file.
eg. ./runInstaller -silent -responseFile my_ee.rsp

Basically followed the Oracle 10G Release 2 install guide made sure the prequisite linux packages were installed, copied and edited the EE.rsp (Enterprise Edition) response file and it was done.

Making a Oracle 10G EE install allowed me to play around with physical and logical standbys to my heart’s content. At the moment I still have to manually edit the tnsnames.ora and listener.ora files to get the new hostname (changes for each instance).

In the future I will rebuild the image with a build script so that it does this automatically.

Have Fun

Paul

Oracle RAC on Amazon EC2

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2

I have looked at Jeff Hunter’s complete install guide for Oracle RAC on home PCs in the past.
Whilst I could go and spend the money I thought I would give Amazon EC2 a whirl given I signed up to the beta. I had signed up back in 2006, however only found out at the start of 2007 that you needed to sign up for Amazon s3 (storage). As soon as I did that I was accepted to the beta.

Given each Amazon EC2 image is running virtual image based on Xen it should be fun.

Stay tuned for the install fun.

Have Fun

Paul