Oracle Data Guard 10g solution in a MC Service

[Asif_8]

Does any one know if you can implement a Oracle Data Guard solution in a MC Service Guard environment? We are a 2 node ServiceGuard cluster 10g As far as I know, Data Guard uses hostname, and you cannot use virtual ip as required for ServiceGuard. What would happen with Data Guard primary node fails over to the alternate stand by ?

[Horia Chirculescu]

Hello Asif.

What would be the purpose of this setup? It seems right to me (in this case) the use of the Oracle Data Guard only if you would have another 2 HP-UX servers with ServiceGuard. Or loose the cluster setup in order to break free the nodes - which is not a very good idea.

Best regards,
Horia.

[Rita C Workman]

We don't run Oracle DataGuard, but from what little I've read it basically does a standby database. So it keeps a standby database updated and when a failure occurs it fails over at the network layer to keep running on the secondary/backup database.

For me it comes down to, not how to implement these together, but who do you want to handle the failover, Oracle or HP.

If you want Oracle to handle things, then having MC/SG is not financially prudent.

However, if you have more going on than just Oracle on that box, or if your cluster is far more robust requiring more than one failover, than Oracle DataGuard may not be the one you want to rely on.

So before trying to figure out how to do something, figure out if you even should.

Kindest regards,
Rita

[Rita C Workman]

..oh I forogt to mention...

And if you're running a standby database, wouldn't that mean you have to have disks for that standby database? So, if I got this right your disk requirement for Oracle DataGuard is double that of MC/SG which uses the same disk and simply turns them over to the failover node in the event of a failure.

Another cost to consider.

/rcw

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Asif,

I presume you mean running dataguard from the database instance that is in the Serviceguard cluster to another database instance somewhere else (in another entirely seperate cluster or standalone?)

What you have discovered is that Dataguard Broker doesn't work in a Serviceguard cluster (in fact it won't work in any non-Oracle cold failover cluster including VCS, Sun Cluster or IBM HACMP). If you're not happy with this I suggest you raise an enhancement request with Oracle (if that will do any good).

Of course you don't _have_ to use Dataguard Broker to run Dataguard - if you are happy to control Dataguard using purely SQL commands through sqlplus rather than DG broker commands through dgmgrl then it will work just fine in a Serviceguard cluster and I've done this myself. You'll find this method of management is not as straightforward and you also won't be able to manage Dataguard through Oracle Enterprise Manager - but it works...

HTH

Duncan