I've got several test Oracle servers running on SLES 10 and z/VM 5.4.0 on our z9 using SAN disk space. I set up the SAN connection using a FICON adapter and the EDEV support. That is working OK, but I'm concerned about where to go from there.
I have to now move our production Oracle database server over to SAN in the next few months (its using CKD volumes tied together with LVM right now). This database is for the college's ERP system, so performance is going to be critical. I'm waying the options for moving it to the SAN and could use some advice from those of you who are already running SAN in production. We haven't done multipathing yet, but are looking into it now. How many physical and virtual paths do you normally use for a high-visbility server? Would 2 be enough, or should we go for 3 or more? Does multipathing introduce a lot of extra workload for z/VM? Do you normally use dedicated connections or do you share them with other servers? (I'm not sure how you monitor the workload for these devices since they are dedicated devices and VM isn't handling their I/O.) Is it worth moving to NPIV before hooking in our production server? I know that it can provide better security for the connections. Does it also help with performance? Any comments would be helpful. Martha
