Failover and VG00

[frederick hannah]

I have an HA environment with Oracle that fails over as designed. However, if Oracle processing creates files under /var, /opt/, etc or any other non-cluster aware filesystem,
how are they available to Oracle on the standy-bye node? How are these files placed on the standby server for Oracle use?

[Rita C Workman]

They are NOT available and they are not placed on the standby node.

To get things over to the standby node - you want to place them in filesystems that you can move (and you can't move vg00 ). So you want to create unique filesystems and include these within your package.

You CAN load oracle under vg00 - but then you WOULD HAVE to load oracle on the standby node under vg00 as well...and generally I do not recommend that, since often you run into situations where the two versions of Oracle are not exactly the same. It takes more disk, but I have found putting your Oracle binaries into your package guarantees you come up with the same Oracle binaries (versions) as you had on the primary node. But this is each persons choice.

To repeat...you can not failover anything on vg00...you must create unique file systems and include these into your package configuration files !!

Hope this helps,
Rgrds,
Rita

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Fred,

The way we work is that we do not failover oracle binaries. We have seperate installation of oracle on all the nodes. Only the data files are failed over from one node to another. However if you still want to failover oracle binaries from one node to another, you just copy a couple of directories from one node to another from vg00, install oracle in another vg and failover that vg. The directories on vg00 that you need to sync on the other server is /var/opt/oracle, /usr/local/bin and the /etc/oratab and /etc/listener.ora and some same type of oracle files / directories.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Sandro Schaer_2]

same over here. oracle was installed on one server and then simply rcp'ed to the other servers in the cluster. all database related files are located inside the packages vg's.

also the initSID.ora file is inside the packages vg. during package startup this initSID.ora file is then copied to $ORACLE_HOME/dbs
by doing this I always have the newest initSID.ora file wherever this package is switched to. also there's no need to do oracle startup with the pfile= option. very simple procedure.

we're running a 8-node cluster with 28 packages and 32 oracle instances.

[Kent Ostby]

If you wanted your oracle scripts and such to move with the package, what you could do is create a mount point under /opt such as /opt/ora/package_mnt_pnt.

Then in your Serviceguard package, you could have a Filesystem that mounted to this point.

Most people, however, have oracle on both systems.

Either they are using Serviceguard/OPS (aka RAC ) or they do it to avoid any problems with the failover (i.e. some other process being active on that mount point and not allowing the package to failover successfully).

Best regards,

Kent M. Ostby

[Rita C Workman]

As was mentioned, you can put your Oracle binaries outside your package, even on vg00. So if you want to put your binaries outside your package...then make sure you have plans in place to keep everything the same on both boxes ALL THE TIME.

But remember, if you failed over to your standby node, than that box is probably DOWN!.....so unless you kept your versions and patch levels and everything exactly the same, you more than likely couldn't copy them over AFTER the failover as has been suggested....

Which is why, although it requires more disk.....some folks put their binaries within the package. It defeats the purpose of failover if you can't come up properly because your 'oracle' is now at a different patch level or something.

The choice is ultimately yours....
Rita

[frederick hannah]

Thanks Failover Folks. I have the answer I need.

[Stuart Abramson_2]

Frederick:

Issue points to the correct answerer.

Stuart