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Roy
Asked: 2009-11-11 10:42:03 +0800 CST

iSCSI or NFS for Oracle VM shared storage?

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I'm configuring a 4 node Oracle VM environment. One management server, two vm servers and a storage server with direct attached storage.

The storage server is running Linux and I thus have the option of providing the shared storage for the VM servers on iSCSI (with OCFS2) or NFS.

Is it likely that one would perform better or more reliably than the other? Any other things one should take into consideration when deciding between the two?

Note that Oracle VM is the Xen based virtualization product from Oracle, not a generic term for virtualized Oracle databases.

xen

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    All other things being equal, I would expect a block-level protocol (iSCSI) to beat out a file-level protocol (NFS) performance-wise.

    An NFS storage area (file system) can be shared simultaneously by more than one host, the storage server's OS would be responsible for arbitrating access to files. You could more easily share a pool of storage for both servers this way. For hosting Oracle VM data, this may be a fairly unimpressive benefit.

    iSCSI has the advantage of making the storage available as a block device. This is likely to be more similar to your production environment. The drawback is that only one host can attach to each iSCSI target at a time.

    I do not know that one would be significantly more reliable than another, but I have a preference for iSCSI.

    Your backup strategy may vary somewhat depending on which solution you go with.

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