Understanding the HP Serviceguard Extension for Oracle E-Business Suite (SGeEBS)

Executive summary

HP understands that designing and building a robust highly-available infrastructure for your Oracle

E-Business Suite (EBS) Applications is key to a successful implementation. Several approaches can be

taken when building resilient systems with EBS and this paper outlines an approach using

Serviceguard extension for EBS (SGeEBS) to integrate with HP Serviceguard (Serviceguard) on HP

Integrity servers running HP-UX.

The key goal of SGeEBS is to build an affordable highly-available infrastructure on which EBS can run

while reducing significant configuration and management complexity from the environment.

During normal operations in a Serviceguard cluster having multiple nodes, the database instance can

run on one of the nodes in the cluster while the applications tier runs on a different node thereby

maximizing the utilization of both servers. Reducing the server count (and consequently the software

instance count too) by taking advantage of HP Integrity scale-up servers you can lower the overall

solution administrative overhead and complexity.

This paper will provide SGeEBS details on how Serviceguard is integrated with EBS, thereby

demonstrating the benefits of high availability with manageable complexity.

Intended audience: This document provides information for technical staff members who are looking

to design and architect EBS implementation for high availability.

Assumptions made:

• Users are familiar with the EBS software architecture, installation and configuration, and

Serviceguard cluster configuration.

• Serviceguard is installed and a cluster having minimum of two nodes is configured.

• The Cluster nodes have enough memory and shared volume groups have enough storage space.

• SGeEBS depot is installed on the cluster nodes dedicated for running EBS.

SGeEBS overview

SGeEBS consists of configuration templates and scripts for easy integration of EBS with Serviceguard.

The database (DB) and Applications (APPS) Tiers of EBS are packaged into two separate failover

packages. Under normal circumstances, these packages will be running on different nodes of the

cluster. When any of these packages or nodes fail, the package running on that node will be failed

over to the adoptive node in the cluster.

SGeEBS uses only standard shell scripting HP-UX commands, Serviceguard commands, and standard

Oracle administration scripts for managing EBS.

The EBS control scripts generated by AutoConfig need not be modified to integrate EBS with

Serviceguard packages. For example, the DB tier Serviceguard package control script includes calls

to the Oracle database control script (addbctl.sh) and Oracle database listener control script

(addlnctl.sh) which are generated by AutoConfig during EBS configuration. Since the EBS-generated

administration scripts were not changed, the Serviceguard packages will continue to function in the

future as patches and upgrades are released for Oracle EBS.