4 Oracle Cluster File System - Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 SP2 - INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION Installation Manual

Oracle Cluster File System 2
Oracle Cluster File System 2 (OCFS2) is a general-purpose journaling file system that
is fully integrated in the Linux 2.6 kernel and later. OCFS2 allows you to store applica-
tion binary files, data files, and databases on devices in a SAN. All nodes in a cluster
have concurrent read and write access to the file system. A distributed lock manager
helps prevent file access conflicts. OCFS2 supports up to 32,000 subdirectories and
millions of files in each directory. The O2CB cluster service (a driver) runs on each
node to manage the cluster.
OCFS2 was added to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 to support Oracle Real Application
Cluster (RAC) databases and its application files, Oracle Home. In SUSE Linux Enter-
prise Server 10 and later, OCFS2 can be used for any of the following storage solutions:
• Oracle RAC and other databases
• General applications and workloads
• XEN image store in a cluster
XEN virtual machines and virtual servers can be stored on OCFS2 volumes that
are mounted by cluster servers to provide quick and easy portability of XEN virtual
machines between servers.
• LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP | PERL | Python) stacks
In addition, it is fully integrated with Heartbeat 2.
As a high-performance, symmetric, parallel cluster file system, OCFS2 supports the
following functions:
Oracle Cluster File System 2
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