Oracle TNS Listener and multiple instances

[Steve Bonds]

What is the best way to start the Oracle TNS listener when there are multiple Oracle instances running on the same node?

The problem is if I set "NET8=yes" in the sample ServiceGuard Oracle script, when the package comes down it will stop the listener. This creates problems for the other instances.

However, if the listener is not already running, it needs to be started.

Here are the options I'm thinking about-- which do you folks think is best?
- Modify the default HP-supplied ORACLE.sh script to only start (and not stop) the listener, potentially earning the ire of HP support when asked to help with a nonstandard environment
- Start the listener externally from ServiceGuard (i.e. rc scripts)
- Create a new script to start the listener and make it a service
- Make the TNS listener availability a ServiceGuard resource (I'm not entirely sure how to do this...)
- other options?

What do you all think is the best way to handle this situation?

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Steve:


I haven't looked at the default HP file but I can tell you what works for me. In my case, the ORACLE_HOME directory moves with the package along with all the oracle data. Each package starts both its svrmgrl
and its own listener - one instance per listener. It is perfectly fine to have more than one listener running on the same box as long as ports do not conflict.

Regards, Clay

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

I would create multiple packages and associate a listener to each instance. In this way things are better controlled and scalable.

If not, you can modify the default script provided by HP and comment out the "stop" procedure as you proposed. I don't think HP will ire about it.

-Sri

[Steve Bonds]

Our DBAs tried the multiple listener scenario a while back and had problems keeping all the different ports organized. They don't really want to try that.

The ORACLE_HOME presently does not fail over since on our systems we often run multiple instances of Oracle and wish to fail them all independently without having to install a dedicated set of Oracle binaries for each one.

We're leaning towards the RC script method right now.

[Santosh Nair_1]

You don't need to install Oracle multiple times once for each package. You can install it once and reference that as ORACLE_HOME in the SG scripts. Alternatively, you can make symbolic links to that install and set ORACLE_HOME to the symbolic links.

As for starting separate listeners, we do it all the time. We start up a different named listener for each package. You just have to keep the listner.ora and tnsnames.ora files in sync with respect to the listener names, host ips and port number...its not very difficult.

-Santosh