VNC Server Blank Gray Screen - Exadata Linux

Recently faced issue of VNC server while we have upgraded exadata operating system. 

We have installed VNC server manually on compute node and tried to start the VNC server. Well, it was starting without any issue but it was giving only gray screen without console output. When we have checked VNC server log file, it was showing  below error.

Log file: /home/oracle/.vnc/dbadm01.test.com:1.log

/root/.vnc/xstartup: line 28: xterm: command not found

This error is indicating that xterm rpm is missing. After installing xterm rpm everything was working fine.

Related errors if respective RPMs are not installed.

/root/.vnc/xstartup: line 27: xsetroot: command not found
/root/.vnc/xstartup: line 29: twm: command not found

What Is Exafusion ?

Exafusion allows database processes to read and send Oracle Real Applications Cluster (Oracle RAC) messages directly over the Infiniband network bypassing the overhead of entering the OS kernel, and running the normal networking software stack.

Benefits
  • Lower latency
  • Improve response time
  • Higher throughput direct to wire block transfers between Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) instances
  • Reduced CPU utilization and better scale-out performance
  • Exafusion is especially useful for OLTP applications because per message overhead is particularly apparent in small OLTP messages. It helps small messages by bypassing OS network layer overhead. 

Parameter
  • EXAFUSION_ENABLED parameter is used to enable or disable the Exafusion accelerate cache fusion protocol feature, which is available on the Linux operating system of Oracle Exadata Database Machine only.
  • Exafusion is disabled by default.
  • To enable Exafusion, set the EXAFUSION_ENABLED initialization parameter to 1. To disable Exafusion, set the EXAFUSION_ENABLED initialization parameter to 0.
  • This parameter cannot be set dynamically. It must be set before instance startup.

Prerequisites and Limitations
  • Oracle Storage Server Software release 12.1.2.1.1 or later is required.
  • Mellanox ConnectX-2 and ConnectX-3 Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) are required.
  • Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 2 Quarterly Update 5 (UEK2QU5) kernels (2.6.39-400.2nn) or later are required.
  • The Exafusion feature does not support mixed mode operation on an Oracle RAC cluster. Either all the instances in an Oracle RAC cluster must have the feature enabled or none.
  • Rolling upgrades of a non-Exafusion enabled Oracle RAC cluster to Exafusion are not supported.
  • Exafusion is available only on the Linux operating system of Oracle Exadata Database Machine
  • It is not supported on any non-engineered system or SPARC Super Cluster (SSC). If you set the EXAFUSION_ENABLED parameter on a non-supported platform, then the instance will be prevented from starting up, and an ORA-00439: The specified feature is not enabled: string error message is generated.
  • This initialization parameter is available starting with Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1.0.2) Bundle Patch 11 (BP11).
 Source: https://docs.oracle.com

What is Cell Efficiency Ration in Exadata?

If you have observed, when we invoke CELLCLI utility, it use to display Cell Efficiency Ratio in banner. Example given below.


So what does cell efficiency ratio indicate?

It is the ratio between data accessed by the storage cell and data processed by the database for the cell. Higher the value greater the I/O savings as a result of offloading.

The Cell Efficiency Ratio is same as the value displayed for offloadEfficiency in CELLCLI>LIST CELL DETAIL as below


Then the ratio of the total MB accessed on the cell to the MB accessed on the host (for the cell) is computed every minute that CELLSRV is active by Management Server (MS). 

It is difficult to explain as there is no manual intervention we can do nor we can fetch detailed result of it. We can use it for reference purpose only as there is no practical value from performance perspective of Exadata.