Practice Free E20-526 XtremIO Solutions and Design Specialist Exam for Technology Architects Exam Questions Answers With Explanation

The block size for both Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR) and Cluster Synchronization Services (CSS) voting files are 512 bytes. I/O operations to these file objects are therefore sized as a multiple of 512 bytes.

This is of no consequence since the best practice with XtremIO is to create volumes with 512e formatting.

References:https://www.emc.com/collateral/white-papers/h13497-oracle-best-practices-xtremio-wp.pdf , page 22

From the menu bar, the Inventory icon is to be clicked to display the Inventory workspace. This workspace takes the place of the Hardware workspace in earlier versions of the XtremIO GUI. With the All Clusters tab selected, we can see a list of all the hardware elements in the managed clusters.

Note: With time, additional clusters can be added to a deployed XMS. In addition, a cluster can be easily moved from one XMS to another. All management interfaces (GUI/CLI/REST) offer inherent multi-cluster management capabilities. Multiple cluster management is supported from version 4.0 and up.

References:

https://community.emc.com/community/connect/everything_oracle/blog/2015/08/27/xtremio-40-multi-array-management

XtremIO clusters with 60 TB of physical usable flash capacity can now logically support 360 TB or more of capacity at typical 6:1 data reduction (deduplication plus compression) ratios. Here we have a 4:1 reduction ratio, so 25 TB would be enough. The 250,000 IOP requirments indicates that we need at least two Bricks.

References: https://store.emc.com/en-us/Product-Family/EMC-XtremIO-Products/EMC-XtremIO-All-Flash-Scale-Out-Array/p/EMC-XtremIO- Flash-Scale-Out

Architecting a database on an All Flash Array (AFA) like EMC’s XtremIO is best done by reviewing practices to optimize I/O performance. One consideration is the use of Advanced Format and how it impacts the performance of the database Redo logs. Advanced Format refers to a new physical sector size of 4096 bytes (4KB) replacing original 512 byte standard.

References:https://community.emc.com/community/connect/everything_oracle/blog/2014/07/18/xtremio-best-practices-advanced-format-512e-and-native-modes

Disk service time T(s) = 32 ms (service time for one I/O).

Response time T(r) is calculated as: T(s) / (1 – Utilization), which here calculates to 32 ms/ (1-0.75) = 128 ms.

References:https://community.emc.com/thread/145100?tstart=0

The default setting for XtremIO volumes is 512e. It is recommended not to alter this in order to use 4K Advanced Format for Oracle Database deployments. There are no performance ramifications when using 512e volumes in conjunction with an Oracle database. On the contrary, 4K Advanced Format is rejected by many elements of the Oracle and Linux operating system stack.

References:https://www.emc.com/collateral/white-papers/h13497-oracle-best-practices-xtremio-wp.pdf , page 20

resxtop is a command to retrieve performance statistics. This command is included in vSphere command line interface (CLI) and is part of the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA), which is an equivalent to esxtop that runs only inside an ESX service console.

The workflow for refreshing XtremIO Snapshots, containing Oracle Database files, consists of the following five simple steps:

1. Shut down the database instances with files in the target Snapshot Set.

2. Dismount the ASM disk group (or file systems) involved.

3. Refresh the Snapshot via XtremIO GUI (or CLI or RESTful API).

4. Mount the ASM disk groups (or file system) involved.

5. Start the database instances.

This entire workflow is measured in seconds (not minutes).

EMC recommended setting for Solaris include that the /etc/system file be modified to include the following parameter:

* Set maximum IO size

set maxphys = 0x400000

This also requires increase of the maximum I/O size for the disk driver. The corresponding entry and file for this change are different for different Solaris versions, as follows:

For Solaris 10 (SPARC):

File: /kernel/drv/ssd.conf

Setting: ssd_max_xfer_size=0x400000;

For Solaris 10 (x86):

File: /kernel/drv/sd.conf

Setting: sd_max_xfer_size=0x400000;

Etc.

References:EMC Host Connectivity Guide for Oracle Solaris, page 167

https://www.emc.com/collateral/TechnicalDocument/docu5132.pdf

XtremIO with VPLEX provides for both synchronous and asynchronous replication.

Note: The engine of RecoverPoint is the RecoverPoint Appliance (RPA).

EMC XtremIO(All-Flash) : SAN, inline deduplication, 8K fixed chunk size;

References:https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/deduplication-fake-reality-mike-uzan

Oracle Database performs I/O on data files in multiples of the database block size (db_block_size), which is 8KB by default. The default Oracle Database block size is optimal on XtremIO. XtremIO supports larger block sizes as well. In the case of multiblock I/O (e.g., table/index scans with access method full), one should tune the Oracle Database initialization parameter db_file_multiblock_read_count to limit the requests to 128KB.

Therefore, the formula for db_file_multiblock_read_count is:

db_file_multiblock_read_count = 128KB / db_block_size

In our case the block size is 1 MB, so the formula db_file_multiblock_read_count is 1 MB/ 8KB = 1024/8 = 128

References:https://www.emc.com/collateral/white-papers/h13497-oracle-best-practices-xtremio-wp.pdf , page 21

The EMC VPLEX family is the next-generation solution for data mobility and access within, across and between data centers.

VPLEX supports two configurations, local and metro. In the case of VPLEX Metro with the optional VPLEX Witness and Cross-Connected configuration, applications continue to operate in the surviving site with no interruption or downtime. Storage resources virtualized by VPLEX cooperate through the stack, with the ability to dynamically move applications and data across geographies and service providers.

Noting the inefficiencies in VMware’s NMP driver, EMC developed a set of drivers specifically designed to overcome these limitations and improve the performance and reliability of the data passing between an array and a server. EMC developed the PowerPath family of products optimized specifically for Linux, Microsoft Windows, and UNIX Operating Systems as well as PowerPath/VE for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors.

PowerPath is installed on hosts to provide path failover, load balancing and performance optimization VPLEX engines (or directly to the XtremIO array if VPLEX is not used).

Note: VMware, with the cooperation of its storage partners, developed a Native Multipathing Plug-in (NMP). VMware NMP was designed to distribute the load over all the available paths and provide failover protection in the case of path, port or HBA failure, but it has not been fully optimized to work with the controllers in a storage systems. VMware’s NMP Round Robin policy does not have the intelligence that PowerPath has as PowerPath uses testing and diagnostics to continually monitor an environment to determine the optimal path for queuing requests and will adapt to current conditions.

References:https://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/emc-taneja-group-powerpath-tb.pdf