Background
In my previous ORION Blog post I described how to prepare a Pure Storage FlashArray block volumes for use with Oracle ORION (ORacle IO Numbers), in this is Blog I am going to show how this can also be done with NFS.
Getting Started – Storage Preparation
For the purposes of this Blog I have created a single NFS volume of 100GB on a Pure Storage FlashBlade and noted it’s name.
Volume Creation

Configure NFS Point
To use our newly created NFS volume we first need to create a Linux mount point and add an entry into our /etc/fstab file e.g.
192.168.4.100:/z-rac1_orion1 /mnt/orion nfs rw,bg,hard,nointr,tcp,vers=3,timeo=600,actimeo=0 0 0
[root@z-rac1 ~]# mkdir /mnt/orion [root@z-rac1 ~]# mount -a [root@z-rac1 ~]# chown oracle:oinstall /mnt/orion [root@z-rac1 ~]# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on ... 192.168.4.100:/z-rac1_orion1 100G 0 100G 0% /mnt/orion
Setting-Up ORION
Now we have prepared and presented our storage we can configure Orion, by default Orion looks a configuration file called orion.lun, however you can also use alternative configuration file by using the testname switch e.g. ‘normal.lun’
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/orion/orion1 bs=1024k count=10000 $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/orion/orion2 bs=1024k count=10000 $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/orion/orion3 bs=1024k count=10000 $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/orion/orion4 bs=1024k count=10000 [oracle@z-rac1 orion]$ ls -l total 40960000 -rw-r--r--. 1 oracle oinstall 10485760000 Jul 15 12:42 orion1 -rw-r--r--. 1 oracle oinstall 10485760000 Jul 15 12:42 orion2 -rw-r--r--. 1 oracle oinstall 10485760000 Jul 15 12:43 orion3 -rw-r--r--. 1 oracle oinstall 10485760000 Jul 15 12:43 orion4 [oracle@z-rac1 orion_test]$ cat normal.lun /mnt/orion/orion1 /mnt/orion/orion2 /mnt/orion/orion3 /mnt/orion/orion4
Running ORION
Orion support 5 types of workload tests Simple, Normal, Advanced, DSS and OLTP. (example output from orion -help
WARNING: IF YOU ARE PERFORMING WRITE TESTS, BE PREPARED TO LOSE ANY DATA STORED ON THE LUNS.
simple - Tests random small (8K) IOs at various loads, then random large (1M) IOs at various loads. normal - Tests combinations of random small (8K) IOs and random large (1M) IOs. advanced - Tests the workload specified by the user using optional parameters. dss - Tests with random large (1M) IOs at increasing loads to determine the maximum throughput. oltp - Tests with random small (8K) IOs at increasing loads to determine the maximum IOPS.
The Orion help provides a number of examples to help you get started, in my next Blog post I will provide further examples and share the output created.
For a preliminary set of data -run simple For a basic set of data -run normal To evaluate storage for an OLTP database -run oltp To evaluate storage for a data warehouse -run dss To generate combinations of 32KB and 1MB reads to random locations -run advanced -size_small 32 -size_large 1024 -type rand -matrix detailed To generate multiple sequential 1MB write streams, simulating RAID0 striping -run advanced -simulate RAID0 -write 100 -type seq -matrix col -num_small 0
In subsequent Blog posts I will share some of my block and NFS results.
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