Best Practices for SGeRAC and Oracle RAC on HP-UX 11i, March 2009

Introduction

This paper describes common best practices for configuring clusters with Serviceguard (SG),

Serviceguard Extension for RAC (SGeRAC), Oracle® Clusterware, and Oracle® Real Application

Cluster (RAC). A basic configuration is shown followed by specific preferred configurations with

regards to the following topics:

• Availability for the public network

• Network for cluster communication

• Storage configuration

• Serviceguard packages

The information in this paper is applicable to Oracle 10g and Oracle 11g Release 1.

Audience

The intended audience is assumed to be familiar with HP-UX 11i, Oracle RAC, and SGeRAC.

Terms and definitions

• APA – Auto Port Aggregation provides bonding of multiple networking interface cards where traffic

is distributed to all interface cards.

• APA/Hot Standby – Auto Port Aggregation Hot Standby mode provides high availability through

bonding of a primary and a standby interface card. Traffic is not distributed.

• CFS – Cluster File System allows multi-system shared access to common file system.

• CSS – Cluster Synchronization Service is a component of Oracle Clusterware that maintains Oracle

cluster membership and heartbeat.

• CSS-HB – Cluster Synchronization Service heartbeat traffic

• CVM – Cluster Volume Manager allows multi-system shared access to volumes.

• GAB – Group Membership Service/Atomic Broadcast manages cluster membership and cluster

communication for Symantec Veritas CFS 4.1/5.0 and CVM 4.1/5.0.

• GMS – Group Membership Service refers to HP’s implementation of the NMAPI2 API on HP-UX with

SGeRAC that provides group membership notification and process monitoring facility to monitor

group status.

• HA – High Availability refers to configurations that are resilient to single failure.

• LLT – Low Latency Transport provides kernel-to-kernel communications at link level and monitors

network connections for Symantec Veritas CFS 4.1/5.0 and CVM 4.1/5.0. Distributes Symantec

Veritas traffic amount network connections and maintains Symantec Veritas heartbeat.

• MNP – Multi-node package, a Serviceguard package that runs on multiple nodes at the same time

and can be independently started and halted on individual nodes.

• OC – Oracle Clusterware can run in conjunction with Serviceguard Extension for RAC and provides

Oracle cluster membership and resource management services.

• OCR – Oracle Cluster Registry is shared storage used to keep Oracle cluster and configuration

information.

• ODM – Oracle Disk Manager is a standard API specified by Oracle for database I/O.

• RAC – Real Application Cluster enables a multi-instances concurrent shared access database.

• RAC-DB-IC – Real Application Cluster Interconnect traffic for both Global Cache Service and Global

Enqueue Service.