Architecture considerations and best practices for architecting an Oracle RAC solution with Serviceguard and SGeRAC

Since Oracle Clusterware doesn’t support redundant networks and doesn’t monitor NICs, either APA

or Serviceguard primary/standby LANs should be used to provide network high availability. Figure 4

shows an example of Serviceguard primary/standby LANs that are used to provide network HA for

public and private networks in an Oracle RAC configuration.

Figure 4: Oracle RAC HA network

Private cluster interconnect for

CSS, GCS/GES (a.k.a. Cache Fusion or DLM)

Clients

Public

network

CRS IP1

CRS IP2

Stationary IP3

Oracle VIP1

Stationary IP4

Oracle VIP2

Oracle VIP1

The remainder of this section discusses how to properly configure these networks for high availability

as well as for fast recovery from network failure.

First, let us look at methods available on HP-UX for configuring a highly available network.

Network high-availability

The ability to quickly detect and respond to network failures is critical to the successful, continuous

operation of the RAC cluster.

In a combined environment with Oracle RAC, Serviceguard provides a more robust way of recovering

from network failures, as well as a means for monitoring IP addresses at the network level.

Serviceguard provides Layer 2 (data link) and Layer 3 (IP/network) monitoring. For more information

about Serviceguard LAN monitoring and failover, see

Managing Serviceguard eighteenth edition.

In general, either APA

• It has a much more robust network monitoring capability. The network sensor in SGeRAC is

implemented as a clustered component. It has the ability to poll the status of a standby NIC in the

local node as well as to use the remote NIC to poll status of the NICs in the local node. It can

pro-actively detect that a standby NIC is down before it is actually used.

or Serviceguard primary/standby LANs can be used to provide network HA

for Oracle RAC public and private networks in a RAC with SGeRAC environment. The preferred

method is Serviceguard primary/standby LANs for the following reasons:

If Serviceguard CFS is used, APA is supported for CFS interconnect beginning with HP Serviceguard Storage Management Suite A.03.00