Operating System - HP-UX
1748180 Members
4086 Online
108759 Solutions
New Discussion юеВ

Re: Oracle 9iRAC and standby servers

 
SOLVED
Go to solution
Hasan_9
Regular Advisor

Oracle 9iRAC and standby servers

Hi Everybody,
I installed Oracle 9iR2 RAC on two HP-UX boxes (Integrity Servers). I used an EVA as shared Storage for RAC. I plan to setup two backup servers for this database. One of the backup should be on local site and another will be on remote site.
About Local Backup server, I am interested to have this backup server updated online so that in case of RAC technology failover or for any other reasons, we can switch to this backup server without much down time or automatically.
About Remote Backup Server, I want to switch to this server whenever both Database and its local Backup Server will be failed (Whenever first site fails), so I should synchronize my Oracle data to this server too. What is your Solution for this case? Please advice

Hasan
8 REPLIES 8
Steven E. Protter
Exalted Contributor

Re: Oracle 9iRAC and standby servers

Oracle has a product called parellel server for thet database which permits online hot replication of the data to another site, if the bandwitch is sufficient.

Serviceguard has a continental cluster product that can be used to fail services such as oracle RAC or oracle server from one site to another.

A careful implementation will lead to a situation called High Availability.

There will be a noticeable delay when the main site goes down and users will notice a pause in processing their requests. When it works right though their connection to the databae is not broken, merely re-routed to the alternate location.

RAC itself has certain clustering capabilities which I'm not as familiar with as what I mentioned above.

SEP
Steven E Protter
Owner of ISN Corporation
http://isnamerica.com
http://hpuxconsulting.com
Sponsor: http://hpux.ws
Twitter: http://twitter.com/hpuxlinux
Founder http://newdatacloud.com
Orhan Biyiklioglu
Respected Contributor

Re: Oracle 9iRAC and standby servers

Since the backup servers will only be standby databases you can use Oracle Data Guard product which was formerly known as "Oracle Standby Server"

Please check:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/availability/htdocs/DataGuardOverview.html

http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/9i/DataGuard.php


hth.
Patti Johnson
Respected Contributor

Re: Oracle 9iRAC and standby servers

Hasan,

If I understand your question correctly, you have two servers running Oracle 9i RAC. You would like to setup two additional servers, one as a local failover, and the other as a remote failover.

Take a look at Oracles Data Guard product. This is an improvement on the old standby database technology.

Your RAC cluster is two servers sharing the same disks ( this was Oracle Parallel Server in versions 6,7,8). The Data Guard product allows you to create a copy of your database on another server and keep it up to date to be used if the primary server fails.

Metalink Note 285358.1 explains how to create a Standby server from a RAC Cluster. There are serveral other whitepapers available from Metalink the detail the steps and options for fault tolerant database configurations.

Patti

Hasan_9
Regular Advisor

Re: Oracle 9iRAC and standby servers

Thank you everybody,

I am looking for HP's solution for this issue.

Hasan
Hasan_9
Regular Advisor

Re: Oracle 9iRAC and standby servers

Dataguard, in 10.1 and below, it is manual failover,and I am using 9iR2 DB, So I am looking for a solution than can handle automatic failover!

Hasan
Yogeeraj_1
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: Oracle 9iRAC and standby servers

hi,

you should also understand the ramifications and the rules that you must follow (a good reading is:
http://download-east.oracle.com/docs/cd/A81042_01/DOC/server.816/a76995/toc.htm )

You do not want the standby to automatically take over - you could really mess things up if the primary is actually OK and still processing work but new connections are "failed" over the standby. You may endup with 2 databases!!!

Ideally, you can have a script that a human, once the determination to fail over is made, runs to automate the failover because having the standby make the decision on its own would not be a good idea.

Why? because there are conditions that are easily corrected on the primary that should be corrected on the primary rather then failing over (eg: failed to connect due to "too many processes" error whereby you only have to increase processes and restart. No need to failover). A human may need to be involved in this process.

I would prefer to handle that manually!

hope this helps!

kind regards
yogeeraj
No person was ever honoured for what he received. Honour has been the reward for what he gave (clavin coolidge)
ARIEL CARY_1
New Member

Re: Oracle 9iRAC and standby servers

Hasan,

I'd like to understand why you want a local failover server. For this server you would need ideally as much resources (CPU, RAM, HDD) as you have in your primary database to undertake the load of the primary server, and keep the data up to date in case of failover; or at least certain percent, say 70%, of the computing power of the main server. Probably it would be a waste of good resources. Oracle RAC by itself is already a high available solution from Oracle and it is pretty sound. But since it follows the share everything cluster model, the only one point of failure is the storage system. You can have as many nodes as the clusterware you're using let you, say you have an 8-node cluster, and if any one of them fails, your database will still be up, also connections on the failed node would migrate to an available node. However, if your storage fails and goes down for any reason, then your whole database is no longer accessible no matter if all nodes are up; all instance would crash indeed. So, I would concentrate more on assuring that the storage sub-system is also highly available. Then, you're more on the safe side and diminish the chances your system goes down. At the HW level you have RAID technology (maybe and EVA expert would suggest a more specific high available solution for this particular storage), and on top of that Oracle let you multiplex important database files, such as the redo log files, control files, offline log files, on separate physical disks so that the database can be up in case of a disk failure. And obviously, maitaining a good backup policy to meet the levels of availability you need (here EVA may help you with snapshot technology).
As for the remote backup server, I do agree with Yogeeraj's arguments as for the manual failover. That's a very tough business decision and should be based on human criteria, not on a script evalution.

Regards,

Ariel

Hasan_9
Regular Advisor

Re: Oracle 9iRAC and standby servers

Thank you Every body