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

Conclusion

The following are highlights of HA features provided by Serviceguard and SGeRAC for Oracle RAC:

• Online node addition and replacement.

• Advanced I/O fencing mechanism provides data integrity protection among nodes both inside and

outside of the cluster.

• I/O fencing for a single instance DB or for the application itself (Oracle Clusterware does not

provide this).

• Ability to secure multiple paths to the data storage array (Oracle relies on the O/S vendor for this).

• Improved monitoring by protection of the Oracle VIP address and protection of all network

interfaces, including the cluster interconnect and IPv6 network (Oracle relies on the O/S vendor for

this high availability protection).

• Enhanced failover time of the cluster, faster than an Oracle Cluster Services-only stack.

• Support for rolling upgrades of HP-UX and Serviceguard.

• Additional HA for third-party applications running on the same cluster as the RAC software.

• File system support for all application-related files including Oracle executables, configuration files

and error logs, any application-related files that are not part of the database itself such as

executables, error log files, configuration files, flat files, etc.

• The ability to activate/deactivate or mount/unmount file systems without custom scripting.

• The ability to deploy cluster file system and/or raw volumes. For the CFS, there is the Oracle Disk

Manager that provides near-raw-volume performance with the manageability of a file system.

Although combining Oracle Clusterware with Serviceguard/SGeRAC means deploying more

components than Oracle Clusterware alone, it provides a significantly more robust HA environment

and gives the RAC cluster administrator more storage-management choices. The Oracle RAC with

SGeRAC integration framework provides an intuitive way to implement and manage the

combined stack.

HP believes the unique capabilities of its Serviceguard suite and the robustness it provides best meet

the high-availability and disaster recovery requirements of a large majority of Oracle database

deployments on HP-UX. This architecture is integrated with HP’s Virtual Server Environment (VSE)

solutions and provides access to a wide range of Disaster Recovery Solutions on HP-UX 11i, including

Metrocluster for Oracle RAC.