Configuring DDBoost for RMAN and Oracle 10g

DDBoost for RMAN is an amazing product, we ran a couple of test backups and here are our results:

Server – HP Proliant G7, 1G NIC
Operating System – RedHat 4.7
Oracle 10g database, 1TB in size
Data Domain 890, 10G interface configured in LACP,  OS 5.1.1.0-291218
DDBoost – RMAN 1.0.1.4 for Linux

Test 1:

RMAN backup to Data Domain nfs export ~= 5 hours

Test 2:

DDBoost RMAN backup to Data Domain ~=36 minutes !!!

The process of configuring Data Domain and Oracle is very straightforward, you can also reference the official document from EMC titled “EMC Data Domain Boost for Oracle Recovery Manager Administration Guide”

• Enable DD Boost feature (assumes you already own and installed the license)

# ddboost enable

• Configure user account that will be used for DD Boost. This will be the only account that can utilize DD Boost and will have access to all storage units

# user add <username> password <password>

# ddboost set user-name <username>

• Configure storage unit, it’s a logical container where you are going to send your backups to. When you create storage unit, it automatically creates an mtree and that will allow you to track storage unit utilization at a later time.  When i talked to Data Domain support they recommended not to exceed 16 mtrees per Data Domain unit as having more could have negative impact on performance

# ddboost storage-unit create <storageunitname>

• Now we need to grant our Oracle host access to storage units, as of DDOS 5.1  i don’t see a way to grant access to specific storage unit, it’s global access

# ddboost access add clients <hostname>

We are done with Data Domain configuration, now let’s configure our Oracle host

• Download RMAN Plug-in from Data Domain website and install it on database server, it’s just a couple of binary files in a tar file for *nix platforms
• Next step is to register storage unit name, ddboost username and password.  I don’t know exactly what happens here but i know it’s not talking to Data Domain because you can enter incorrect password or username and it will still complete successfully

RUN
{
CONFIGURE DEFAULT DEVICE TYPE TO SBT_TAPE; # default
CONFIGURE DEVICE TYPE SBT_TAPE Backup TYPE to BACKUPSET;
CONFIGURE CHANNEL DEVICE TYPE ‘SBT_TAPE’
PARMS ‘SBT_LIBRARY=/u01/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/dbhome/lib/libddobk.so, ENV=(STORAGE_UNIT=storageunitname,BACKUP_HOST=datadomain890.mycompany.local,ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/dbhome)’;

ALLOCATE CHANNEL c1 TYPE SBT_TAPE
PARMS ‘SBT_LIBRARY=/u01/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/dbhome/lib/libddobk.so, ENV=(STORAGE_UNIT=storageunitname,BACKUP_HOST=datadomain890.mycompany.local,ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/dbhome)’;
send ‘set username ddboostusername password XXXX servername datadomain890.mycompany.local’;

RELEASE CHANNEL c1;
}

• Let’s run a backup, in this example we are using 6 channels. In our environment this gave us the most speed before we started seeing high spikes in CPU utilization

RUN {
CONFIGURE DEFAULT DEVICE TYPE TO SBT_TAPE; # default
CONFIGURE DEVICE TYPE SBT_TAPE Backup TYPE to BACKUPSET;
CONFIGURE CHANNEL DEVICE TYPE ‘SBT_TAPE’
PARMS ‘SBT_LIBRARY=${ORACLE_HOME}/lib/libddobk.so, ENV=(STORAGE_UNIT=storageunitname,BACKUP_HOST=datadomain890.mycompany.local,ORACLE_HOME=${ORACLE_HOME})’;

ALLOCATE CHANNEL c1 TYPE SBT_TAPE
PARMS ‘SBT_LIBRARY=${ORACLE_HOME}/lib/libddobk.so, ENV=(STORAGE_UNIT=storageunitname,BACKUP_HOST=datadomain890.mycompany.local,ORACLE_HOME=${ORACLE_HOME})’;

ALLOCATE CHANNEL c2 TYPE SBT_TAPE
PARMS ‘SBT_LIBRARY=${ORACLE_HOME}/lib/libddobk.so, ENV=(STORAGE_UNIT=storageunitname,BACKUP_HOST=datadomain890.mycompany.local,ORACLE_HOME=${ORACLE_HOME})’;

ALLOCATE CHANNEL c3 TYPE SBT_TAPE
PARMS ‘SBT_LIBRARY=${ORACLE_HOME}/lib/libddobk.so, ENV=(STORAGE_UNIT=storageunitname,BACKUP_HOST=datadomain890.mycompany.local,ORACLE_HOME=${ORACLE_HOME})’;

ALLOCATE CHANNEL c4 TYPE SBT_TAPE
PARMS ‘SBT_LIBRARY=${ORACLE_HOME}/lib/libddobk.so, ENV=(STORAGE_UNIT=storageunitname,BACKUP_HOST=datadomain890.mycompany.local,ORACLE_HOME=${ORACLE_HOME})’;

ALLOCATE CHANNEL c5 TYPE SBT_TAPE
PARMS ‘SBT_LIBRARY=${ORACLE_HOME}/lib/libddobk.so, ENV=(STORAGE_UNIT=storageunitname,BACKUP_HOST=datadomain890.mycompany.local,ORACLE_HOME=${ORACLE_HOME})’;

ALLOCATE CHANNEL c6 TYPE SBT_TAPE
PARMS ‘SBT_LIBRARY=${ORACLE_HOME}/lib/libddobk.so, ENV=(STORAGE_UNIT=storageunitname,BACKUP_HOST=datadomain890.mycompany.local,ORACLE_HOME=${ORACLE_HOME})’;

backup filesperset 1 blocks all database format ‘%d_DATABASE_%T_%t_s%s_p%p’ tag ‘${ORACLE_DB} database backup’;
backup current controlfile format ‘%d_controlfile_%T_%t_s%s_p%p’ tag ‘${ORACLE_DB} Controlfile backup’;
backup spfile format ‘%d_spfile_%T_%t_s%s_p%p’ tag ‘${ORACLE_DB} Spfile backup’;

release channel c1;
release channel c2;
release channel c3;
release channel c4;
release channel c5;
release channel c6;
}

• As this backup is running and you want to monitor its performance from Data Domain side, you can use this command:

# ddboost show stats interval 5 count 100

• If you want to look at storage-unit statistics (# of files, compress/dedupe rate)

# ddboost storage-unit show compression

A couple of of issues that you may encounter with your implementation

• We got this error message below when we  specified incorrect password during ddboost rman client registration (first RMAN script above)

RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03009: failure of backup command on c6 channel at 02/11/2013 17:59:10
ORA-19506: failed to create sequential file, name=”DB3_DATABASE_20130211_p1″, parms=””
ORA-27028: skgfqcre: sbtbackup returned error
ORA-19511: Error received from media manager layer, error text:
sbtbackup: dd_rman_connect_to_backup_host failed

• We got this error message when we exported storage unit via NFS and change ownership of some files.

RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03009: failure of backup command on c3 channel at 02/11/2013 14:55:31
ORA-19506: failed to create sequential file, name=”DB3_DATABASE_20130211_p1″, parms=””
ORA-27028: skgfqcre: sbtbackup returned error
ORA-19511: Error received from media manager layer, error text:
sbtbackup: Could not create file DB3_DATABASE_20130211_p1 on host datadomain890.mycompany.local, error 5034