1. Maintenance Guide
  2. Maintaining Oracle Exadata Storage Servers
  3. Changing Existing Elastic Configurations for Storage Cells
  4. Adding Storage Cells using OEDACLI

3.8.3 Adding Storage Cells using OEDACLI

OEDACLI provides the interface to perform elastic storage expansion for different configurations such as Bare Metal, single Oracle VM or multiple Oracle VMs.

OEDACLI creates all the objects required on the storage servers and adds the new grid disks to the disk groups. One of the existing storage servers acts as a guide for the configuration of the new storage servers. There is only one rebalance operation triggered even if multiple storage servers are added. The grid disks of the new servers are added to all the disk groups for all the clusters configured.

Prerequisites

  • All the new storage servers must be installed in and connected into the physical rack.
  • All the new storage servers must have the management and RDMA Network Fabric networks configured.
  • OEDACLI must run on a machine that has network access to the database servers (bare metal or guest domains) and the storage servers.
  1. Generate a new OEDA XML configuration file, reflecting an exact list of the current database servers and storage servers used in the environment.
    Use the OEDA DISCOVER command, where the dirname usually is the directory where OEDACLI is installed and host_names_list is the list of nodes to be discovered, separated by commas or spaces, for example, 'dbnode1,dbnode2,celadm01,celadm02'. 
    DISCOVER ES hostnames='host_names_list' location='dirname'

    For an environment with multiple Oracle VMs, the command generates a global XML configuration file containing information of all clusters, and also one XML configuration file for each cluster. In the following commands, you should use the global XML configuration file instead of a cluster-specific configuration file.

  2. Create an OEDACLI script to update the XML configuration file using OEDACLI.

    For each cell to be added, the script requires:

    • The name (hostname) of one cell which is part of the current configuration, to be used as a reference for the creation of the objects (cell disks, grid disks, flash cache, and so on)
    • The name (hostname) and IP addresses for the Management and RDMA Network Fabric interfaces.
    • The rack number. For non-interconnected environments this is 1.
    • ULOC is the location on the physical rack. Although it is not used for the storage expansion, pick the value according the information referenced in Oracle Exadata Database Machine System Overview, Part 2 - Cabling Diagrams

    Save the following commands in a file named add_cell_script.cmd. In this example, two new storage servers are being added: celadm04 and celadm05. 

    CLONE NEWCELL SRCNAME=celadm01 tgtname=celadm04
SET ADMINNET NAME=celadm04, IP=203.0.113.35
SET PRIVNET NAME1=celadm04-priv1, IP1=192.168.216.235, NAME2=celadm04-priv2, IP2=192.168.216.236
SET ILOMNET NAME=celadm04-ilom, IP=203.0.113.135
SET RACK NUM=1, ULOC=39
SAVE ACTION FORCE
CLONE NEWCELL SRCNAME=celadm01 tgtname=celadm05
SET ADMINNET NAME=celadm05, IP=203.0.113.36
SET PRIVNET NAME1=celadm05-priv1, IP1=192.168.216.221, NAME2=celadm05-priv2, IP2=192.168.216.222
SET ILOMNET NAME=celadm05-ilom, IP=203.0.113.136
SET RACK NUM=1, ULOC=14
SAVE ACTION FORCE
SAVE FILE
  3. Run the script add_cell_script.cmd.

    In this example, the oeda_xml_file is the file generated in the first step, and add_cell_script.cmd is the script created in the previous step. 

    $ oedacli -c oeda_xml_file -f add_cell_script.cmd

    When you run the script, it updates the OEDA XML configuration file, adding directives and attributes related to the new storage servers. It does not trigger any action on any component (storage servers or database servers).

  4. Create an OEDACLI script to configure the new storage server(s), or cell(s).

    The script uses the following settings:

    • The Oracle ASM power limit for rebalance is set to 4, which is an Oracle MAA best practice.
    • The WAIT option is set to FALSE, which means the disk rebalance operations are run in parallel for every disk group in the cluster. The number of outstanding rebalances that can be run concurrently is limited to the number of database servers. If you set WAIT to TRUE, then each rebalance operation is run sequentially.

    Save the following commands in a file named config_cell_script.cmd. In this example, the cluster name is q1-vm01. Replace this with the name of your cluster. Also, replace the example cell names (celadm04,celadm05) with your own. 

    ALTER CLUSTER ADDCELLS='celadm04,celadm05' power=4, wait=false WHERE clustername='q1-vm01'
SAVE ACTION
MERGE ACTIONS
DEPLOY ACTIONS
SAVE FILE
  5. Run the script config_cell_script.cmd.

    In this example, the oeda_xml_file is the file generated in the first step, and config_cell_script.cmd is the script created in the previous step. 

    $ oedacli -c oeda_xml_file -f config_cell_script.cmd

    When you run the script, it creates the flash cache, flash log, cell disks and grid disks. It also adds the disks to the Oracle ASM disk groups and adds the storage servers to the cluster.

Parent topic: Changing Existing Elastic Configurations for Storage Cells