Exachk in Exadata

What is Exachk and use in Exadata?

Oracle Document ID to get Exacheck Utility : 1070954.1

Exachk is designed to audit configuration of Oracle Exadata Machine which includes 

• DB Server, 
• Cell Storage, 
• Infiniband switch, 
• Software,
• Database  
• Ethernet Network.

Exachk report should be fetched after the initial Oracle Exadata Database Machine deployment, as a part of the routine maintenance schedule ,before and after any system configuration change and patching activity.

Phases:

There are four phase in exachk execution.

1) Minimal Input 

2) Data Collection

3) Analysis

4) HTML Report Generation

1. Minimal Input

• Check user equivalence between all the DB servers for Oracle user
• Search database which are running on Exadata and registered in OCR
• Provide output, which database should part of best practice check
• Search Oracle home of selected database which are part of best practice check
• Check the status of Oracle software stack Clusterware, ASM, RDBMS
• Copy of plug-ins which required to execute Exacheck report
• It asks for Storage server password
• Provide output based on given options
• Provide storage server root credential
• Exachk will verify root password for storage servers
• Provide Database server credential
• Exachk will verify root password for compute nodes
• It will create collection and audit checks log file
• Checking of .bash_profile of Oracle user on compute nodes
• It will start exachk on one of the node

2. Data Collection

Collect the required data from compute node, Storage server and Infiniband switch.

Data Collection includes below details.

• Database --Initialize Parameters, RMAN, Listener, Patch, Data corruption prevention, Database failure prevention, MAA
• GI      -- Patch, Version, Status, node failure prevention, Cluster Failure prevention
• Infiniband  -- Network check, /etc/hosts file, NTP configuration, firmware, health status, switch type, ports
• Cell      -- Cell disk configuration, Temperature, flash cache configuration, flash log configuration
• ASM     -- Initialize parameters, Data corruption prevention, Disk/cell failure prevention,
• OS          -- CPU, parameter of sysctl.conf file, users, time zones, Kernel, OFED, System logs, Network, ILOM, NTP,LVM,Imageinfo,
• Others  -- Exadata critical issue, Consolidation check, Site failure prevention,software maintenance, version for all the software, Machine Model/details, Firmware, Alert configuration

3. Analysis

Check best practice on all the devices and installed software as well database based on collected data.

4. Generate HTML report 

Once best practice check completes, it generates HTML report which you can review for further system improvement.

Exacheck Report Structure:

• Cluster Summary
• Findings Needing Attention
• MAA Scorecard
• Findings Passed
• System wide Automatic Service Request (ASR) health check
• Killed Processes
• Skipped Checks
• Excluded Checks
• Top 10 Time Consuming Checks

It gives five types of indication based upon that you can act on particular findings.

  

FAIL     =>    If best practice doesn't meet or not set as per best practice which is critical

WARNING => If best practice doesn't meet or not set as per best practice which is non critical

PASS          =>    If something is configured as per best practice than it will indicate with PASS

INFO             =>    For information purpose

ERROR         =>   If there is any configuration mismatch