server woes: when to throw in the towel

I hear your pain. That's all i can say. I'm about ready to go into a different field or start working a one man show again in a small company.

 

oracle is a beast

 

Sounds like there's something on the motherboard that's not quite right, or on the RAID controller card, and it fries the other components. I can't imagine cables being bad. Never EVER had that problem.

Get a configured server from Dell, or a blank one. Stick Win20003 Advanced Server on it, put on the cluster stuff (it was called WolfPack during beta, dunno what they named it, then configure the AD policies, and then slap MS SQL Server on the bad boy. Standard stuff with plenty of support out there. And data migration should be a non-issue at this stage.

Will the app run with SQL Server or will it require a complete rewrite? If so, I guess you're stuck with Ellison's love child. I don't envy you one bit. Best of luck.

 

We are running a couple of different clusters on win2003 and they work great

 

Good to hear - we'll be doing a POC on clustering our Exchange servers next year.

 

Clustering on Exchange? I am presuming to be even more compliant with Sorbanes-Oxley? Exchange is tricky...even MS Support on Exchange is weak.

Don't skimp on the expertise (vet them thoroughly), or you will end up with cascading nightmares.

 

Sounds to me like parts are being thrown at SYMPTOMS and nobody knows what the CAUSE is.

A common mistake that auto mechanics make.

 

Ditto that, unless this is some sort of white-box setup I cannot imagine any modern server being that bad. How's the power to the server/chassis? I'd almost bet on bad voltage somewhere frying random parts.

 

Drop Wintel and go Sun... much more stable for Oracle as a DB server... I typically use Sun 880's (now 890's) - very nice platform for DB servers...

Also - I would recommend using a SAN and not local Raid drives - provides more redundancy and you will not lose data... Of course now you are talking a lot lot lot more dollars...

Of course if you are talking for home stuff - I have a Wintel Box running Linux with Oracle 9i - raid 5... Works pretty well - but not real heavy use of course...

 

We are a MS shop, but also run Sun 220 & 450R's. It was cheaper to buy spare servers off ebay than continue with the Sun maintenance contracts!!

 

Dell RAID controllers are total crap. Are they still using those PERC cards?

Throwing Oracle on a box with those sounds like a recipe for disaster as Oracle never runs 100% on Windows. I have only used Oracle on Windows for testing for that reason. Did you try using win2k insted of 03?

I would say you have a fussy power supply first then look at the above concerns. IBM Servers run Oracle well.

i'm also partial to HP server for Windows.

 

I thought a SWAG was a scientific wild ass guess, at least in Purdue engineering circles.

Good luck, you were a great help when I had problems a few months ago. I wish I could return the favor.

 

I've never used RHE3. How do you like it?

 

Yeah we have been running Win2003 Clustering for Exchange and our File servers. No problems at all with Exchange. We have and Exchange Org that vents out to different domains and then into different Forests and all brought together through MIIS for a Complete GAL of all involed with us within our Forest or the other Forests. We have had this installed for over a year now and the preformance is great and much better than the Groupwise system we had that we are still in the process of dumping 400+ servers out of the tree.

 

What is holding you up from dumping the 400 servers? Should be straightforward to excise them from the forest, unless you need to migrate apps or there's other dependencies? If so, are they related to Exchange?

Also, anything, even letter-writing, is an improvement over Groupwise--agree?

 

The 400 or so servers in the Novell tree are throughtout about 13 states and are owned by different associations. Most of them are off after about a year but there are still some of our associations that have yet to migrate fully off of Novell. By the end of June we should be done and shut down the last of the Novell servers. We had just about 300+ applications at our location that we brought over and into MS SMS. We designed our Exchange system to be totally independent of the old Groupwise system so we we migrated it was an easy switch after we converted all archives over to a PST file.

Groupwise blew big chunks. You were always running GW checks on mailboxs and Post Offices. We have had only 1 tiny problem with an Exchange mailbox and it was fixed in a heartbeat. Now I just have to finish up getting my MCSE (boot camp time)

 

Novell...a brand that elicits nothing but revulsion (at least in me)!

I don't know about tougher, but I hear the MCSE certification has gotten a lot more comprehensive since I got certified in the late 90's. Only natural, I guess, considering all that's been added on. Since the courses were about a $1800 each and I didn't have time to read 500-page tomes, I did it by the brute force method...I figured I'd be way ahead if I kept taking the $60 exams until I passed. Luckily, I never needed to take anything more than twice, and about half I passed on the first try. At the time, if you took your exams at trade shows, you could take them for half price...

How are you finding it? Good luck.

 

The tests are quite a bit harder than when I took them back in the NT 4.0 days. That's why I figured that I would just pony up and do the 2 week boot camp and let them tell me eaxctly what will be on the tests. I have been working with 2003 for more than a year now in a pretty complex enviroment so it should be easy to relate to what they will be testing me on. Hopefully they won't get too crazy with what they want you to know.

 

Hey Randy, dosen't it make you wish these guys still had Oracle support?

I bet this machine here could handle your entire load and then some, and it's about 1/2 the cost on today's used market.

Too bad oracle support ended around 7i or so?

I had to move our web cluster to RHES3 about a year ago, off SGI Origin200s. We went from literally no problems in 4 years, to 3 seperate events of downtime greater than 30 min. What a fuster-cluck. And Redhat still dosen't recognise the built-in gig-ethernet jacks at all. It's only high-dollar INTEL motherboards running INTEL pro1000e chipsets, why should I expect it to work? <sigh>

Bring back the SGIs. Heck, just bring back the application support. IRIX 6.5 and the Onyx2/Origin hardware are still competitive today.
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Minor addition/clarification:

That's physical device, not logical.

Cheers,

Me