Regarding Oracle RAC cluster with Mc/Service Guard

[Satish Kumar_5]

Hi Friends,

I have one query regarding Oracle RAC Clustering with MG.Is it possible to create a oracle rac cluster with default MC/SG provided with HP-UX 11i?? also can we do a active/passive DB Cluster with default MC/SG?? Thanks in advance for ur invaluable help

[Steven E. Protter]

You must have the Enterprise or Mission Critical version of 11i. Not sure if its 11i v1 or 11i v2.

The answer to your question is yes.

I'm not actually sure you need ServiceGuard to pull this off. Oracle RAC is a clustering technology.

Let me give you a little overview on what ServiceGuard can do. It not complete but hopefully relavent.

1) If you have shared storage/disk between two nodes, service guard can fail over an entire volume group. What really happens is when the failover node takes over the volume group is activated on the failover node. This lets item 2 happen.

2) Your oracle binaries can bet set to fail over and start oracle database or RAC on the failover node. When the application fails over it gets going its actually possible to run off the same data.

Substantial customization has been done to allow for oracle failover on ServicGuard.

What you are asking might be a bit of overkill. RAC is supposed to provide some cluster services.

In summary however if you want to have two RAC setups, active and passive and you have enough nodes, you can do it with ServiceGuard.

SEP

[Satish Kumar_5]

Hi Steven,
Thanks for ur quick reply.Actualy Oracle RAC require a cluster framwork already installed.We have asked oracle and they sent a doc to us which is Oracle RAC clustering on Linux but generic to all Unix also.oracle has a Cluster file system for Linux but not for any other unix.anyway we can use raw volume for RAC.We have Mc/SG A.11.15.00 supplied with HP-UX 11i.Our DB will be on HP VA 7110.What i want to know can we do a oracle RAC cluter w/o MC/SG extension for ORacle RAC? If not then can we do a simple Oracle Database failover Cluster with default Mc/SG A.11.15.00??

Thanks again

[Steven E. Protter]

Yes you can do it without the SG extension for RAC. You might find it easier and faster to do it with the head start such a product provides.

As far as ServiceGuard Version goes, I would upgrade to the latest and greatest. Since you haven't started its a lot easier to start out with ServiceGuard current than it is to upgrade once you are running.

SEP

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Satish,

You cannot do Oracle RAC without the SGeRAC extension. It provides Group Membership services necessary for RAC. You will need to purchase it seperately.

You can do active/passive DB cluster with default serviceguard though. The default serviceguard also provides oracle toolkit that you can find under /opt/cmcluster directory.

-Sri

[Satish Kumar_5]

Thanks Sri,

I m not able to find any opt/cmcluster directory.1 etc/cmcluster is there. pls if u can tell or some document i can refer regarding oracle cluster using default Mc/SG, pls let me know.

thanks a lot.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Satish,

If you still have the Mission Critical OE CDs, then see ifyou have the product called "SG-Oracle-Tool". There are other toolkits like NFS, Informix, Samba etc., also.

It isn't complicated to create active/passive cluster. It's a matter of writing a script to accept 'start' and 'stop' scripts. However, if you would like to monitor database processes, then you would need to broaden your script to take care of it. Oracle toolkit will readily do it for you.

For general serviceguard setup, look at the following document. It has got some examples configurations.

http://docs.hp.com/hpux/onlinedocs/B3936-90079/B3936-90079.html
-Sri

[Steven E. Protter]

A few threads that may help.

http://search.hp.com/redirect.html?url=http%3A//forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do%3FthreadId%3D75163&qt=oracle+%2Bcluster+%2Bserviceguard&hit=10

http://search.hp.com/redirect.html?url=http%3A//forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do%3FthreadId%3D61199&qt=oracle+%2Bcluster+%2Bserviceguard&hit=11

http://search.hp.com/redirect.html?url=http%3A//forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do%3FthreadId%3D16787&qt=oracle+%2Bcluster+%2Bserviceguard&hit=4

With regards to getting Oracle RAC to work with Serviceguard without extensions I admit to not being sure.

I'm a beginner with Serviceguard, but I've been through HP training.

My instructor made clear to me that he had never seen an application he could not make fail over with serviceguard from node to node. He had extenstive experience.

I'm sure the extension will help, but the reasons given for it not working, permissions and such can be done manually.

As a practical matter, I back Sridar, because its obvious he has a lot of hands on SG experience. The extension is the way to go. It certainly does work that would be difficult to do by hand.

SEP

[Satish Kumar_5]

Thanks Sri & SEP for ur time
I have chekced all my CDs(application CDs) but didnt found any oracle toolkit for SG.we have licence for only MC/SG and HP Mirrordisk/UX.So what are the options left now?To tell u we have Oracle EBS(E-Bussiness Suite) and we want to do a clustering.It has oracle RAC bundled with it.but we dont want to purchase any other s/w than what we already have,for now. pls reply.

Thanks in advance.
Regs
Satish

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Satish,

If you haven't purchased "Mission Critical" OE, then you won't get them. Serviceguard and the toolkits are part of Mission Critical OE. Unfortunately, you will have to seperately buy them.

Read the document. You should be able to build a active/passive cluster on your own though it may not be completely automated.

-Sri

[Satish Kumar_5]

Hi,

If i do a active/passive oracle DB cluster with default Mc/SG with putting a single start DB shel script and another for stop DB shel script, will it do a failover if any oracle service dies?? is there any way we can make Mc/SG Monitor those services? have anyone done this kind of setup before? if someone can send me any docs or something. I have seen some earlier docs but those all were specific to Mc/SG or Mc/SG with OPS. My boss dont want to buy anything. he is asking me to use the avaialbe resource. any help would be appreciated.

regs
Satish

[Thayanidhi]

Hi Satish,

You have only Mc/SG and Mirror-UX!
So, Avoid configuring RAC.RAC requires SGeRAC. If you don't have mission critical OE, then you may buy "Enterprise cluster toolkit" as a seperate product, which includes oracle,informix,samba..etc monitoring scripts. If you have to write your own monitoring script, it would be nightmare.

You may still configure a cold failover cluster and install oracle (not RAC). You won't be able to monitor Oracle. Only hardware failures are protected.

Regards

T.Thayanidhi

[Satish Kumar_5]

hi Thayanidhi,

Thanks for the advice. i was also thinking on the same lines.tell me what if i go for veritas cluster server with a simple oracle DB cluster.will it work with oracle apps??. any idea??

Regs
Satish