MC/Service Guard and Oracle

[Chun Wong]

I am looking for an HA solution to running an Oracle database. I have two Unix boxes. With MC/Service Guard, do I need to have Oracle installed on BOTH Unix boxes so that MC/Service Guard can toggle each database active as needed? The reason I ask is so that I know how to price-out my Oracle licensing which depends on number of installed machines.

I am new to MC/Service Guard.

[James R. Ferguson]

Chun:

In an MC/ServiceGuard environment, an application (package) switches (is adopted) by a node in a failover. The shared hardware could be a disk (array) that includes Oracle executables) so that during normal operations only node-A was actually running Oracle. This type of setup would be known as an active/standby cluster.

An excellent starting point for understanding high-availability is an HP professional book "Clusters for High Availability: A Primer of HP-UX Solutions" by Peter S. Weygant (ISBN 0-13-494758-4).

If you are serious about MC/ServiceGuard, be sure to take HP's course on it before you start. Setting up a successful MC/ServiceGuard environment is not trivial and requires a good knowledge of hardware and software.

You can also read the manual at:

http://docs.hp.com/hpux/onlinedocs/B3936-90026/B3936-90026.html

...JRF...

[Rita C Workman]

James has said it all....
I especially agree with the education on MC/Service Guard. In so much as I have MC/SG and have not yet taken this class...I can truly appreciate the headache in working with it...and learning it the hard way. Save yourself the grief and try for the course first.
I might also add, if you haven't taken POSIX shell programming (or similar) you might want to consider it too....Understanding our MC/SG config files, this knowledge became invaluable.

Regards,

[John Palmer]

Chun,

You can either install Oracle on both servers or install it as part of a volume group that moves with the package.

The latter is more sensible in most circumstances as it is easier to administer and is cheaper to license.

You might consider the former if you had say two Oracle instances one normally on node A and the other on node B but with either node capable of running both in the event of failure.

Regards,
John

[Manju Kampli]

you need to have only one oracle license. configure the MC/SG in such a way that, during the failover, the file system where oracle software is installed does also move to the standby system. this is what most of the installation do and also recommended by HP