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Best Practices for Oracle 11g Backup and Recovery using RMAN and Dell EqualLogic Snapshots

5.2 Virtualized backup server

A backup server is an auxiliary host that runs Oracle RMAN and mounts the collection of volume

snapshots described in the previous section.

Why run a dedicated backup server?

The backup server completely offloads the backup processing to a different host. This results in no

impact due to RMAN processing on the production database servers. This server can also be used to

install external backup agents. For example, you could run Symantec BackupExec “Disk-to-Tape”

backup operations on this system.

Why virtualize the backup server?

RMAN backup processing does not require full-time dedicated server resources. A virtualization

platform gives you the flexibility to share the system resources required by the backup process with

other virtualized systems when backup or recovery operations are not running.

5.3 Backup and recovery procedure using EqualLogic snapshots and RMAN

In this section we provide an outline of the steps used to perform user managed database backup and

recovery using EqualLogic snapshots and RMAN.

Snapshot-based backup:

1. Place the production database in hot backup mode.

2. Login to the EqualLogic group with the Group Manager GUI or CLI and create the snapshot of

the volume collection (the Oracle database and redo log volumes). This step can also be

automated using CLI scripts.

3. End the database hot backup mode.

4. Archive the redo logs so that the required redo logs are available for recovery.

We developed an Expect

Appendix B

script to automate steps 1-4 above. The source code for that script is

included in on page 37.

RMAN backup using snapshots mounted on the virtualized backup server:

1. Using the EqualLogic Group Manager, place the snapshots online and configure them so that

they can be mounted by backup server.

On the backup server:

2. Copy the database initialization parameter file and ASM instance parameter files from

production database to appropriate locations on the backup server (this step is only required

the first time this procedure is completed). Since the database will be mounted as a single

http://expect.sourceforge.net/

Note: the steps below can be automated using command scripts.