Oracle 10G RAC and LAN Card failover with ServiceGuard

[Mark Smithers]

We are trying to install a two node 10G RAC Standard Edition on 11.23 and have run into the following issue:

From a hardware perspective, we have built a solution that would conform to a ServiceGuard Cluster. We then installed the Oracle CRS software and assigned the VIP and interconnect to LAN0 and LAN1 respectivly. These two LAN cards could failover to LANS 2 and 3.

After installing the Oracle CRS, we created the ServiceGuard Cluster and defined the failover of the LAN cards. The LAN cards have static addresses on them as defined in /etc/rc.config.d/netconf.

We then installed the Oracle database on both nodes and everything seems to be ok. We have Oracle CRS running, the VIP address is there and the cluster looks OK. We have not yet defined any ServiceGuard packages though.

What we have noticed it that if the primary LAN card was to fail, for example the card with the VIP (LAN0), ServiceGuard does its thing and move to LAN2, but CRS rips down and removes the VIP address. I understand that this is because Oracle CRS seems to bind with a specfic LAN card.

My question then, is how to use ServiceGuard to provide LAN card failover for a Standard edition Oracle 10G RAC? Does anybody have any documentation that describes this build process. I have the cookbooks from the Oracle/HP CTC but they don't explain this bit as far as I can see.

Thanks in advance for any help

Mark

[Duncan Edmonstone · Accepted solution]

Mark,

If you want to use Serviceguard to manage your LANs in an Oracle RAC cluster, then you need to let Serviceguard be the cluster manager, *not* CRS - that also means you have to used shared LVM (SLVM) or clustered veritas volume manager (CVM) for storage rather than ASM (which I pesume you are using).

But what I think you want to do, is have Oracle manage the NIC failover which it *can* do for the public network ( I think via the oifcfg utility).

For the private interconnect you could use serviceguard, or just APA.

HTH

Duncan

[melvyn burnard]

RAC 10g CRS Virtual IP addresses (VIP) must not be configured with LAN interfaces configured for Serviceguard local LAN failover. For increased redundancy, CRS can be configured to use an APA aggregate, however since all aggregate links must pass through the same network switch that switch is a single point of failure. The APA Lan Monitor mode (which offers better redundancy) is deactivated if Serviceguard is installed on the system, so it cannot be used.