Using Serviceguard Extension for RAC, 10th Edition, April 2013

status of the ASM diskgroups mentioned in that ASMDG MNP. If one or more ASM diskgroup is
in a dismounted state, the check function will report failure—the ASM diskgroup is dismounted
without using cmhaltpkg. The service that invokes the function fails at this point and the SGeRAC
package manager fails the corresponding ASMDG MNP and the RAC MNP that is dependent on
ASMDG MNP.
How Serviceguard Extension for RAC Toolkit starts, stops, and checks the RAC
database instance
Next, the toolkit interaction with the RAC database is discussed.
The MNP for the RAC database instance provides start and stop functions for the RAC database
instance and has a service for checking the status of the RAC database instance.
The start function executes su to the Oracle software owner user id. It then determines the Oracle
instance id8 on the current node for the specified database using srvctl status database.
Then it starts the corresponding RAC database instance using srvctl start instance. If an Oracle
Clusterware placement error occurs, indicating that CRS is not ready to start the instance, the
function sleeps for 2 minutes and then retries. At most 3 attempts are made to start the instance.
The stop function executes su to the Oracle software owner user id. It then determines the Oracle
instance id on the current node for the specified database using srvctl status database.
Then it stops the corresponding Oracle RAC instance using srvctl stop instance. If the user
configurable parameter STOP_MODE is abort and Oracle RAC Instance is not halted by srvctl
command within ORA_SHUTDOWN_TIMEOUT seconds, the Oracle RAC instance is terminated via
killing its background processes.
The check function executes ps and crs_stat commands to determine the health of RAC instance.
When the Oracle database instance MNP is in maintenance mode, the RAC instance health
checking is paused. Otherwise, in a continuous loop driven by a configurable timer, the check
function runs ps to check the number of the monitored RAC instance background processes. If one
or more RAC background processes are gone and crs_stat command shows Oracle Clusterware
has not restarted the Oracle RAC instance, the function will report the RAC instance as down. This
means that the RAC instance failed or has been inappropriately shut down without using
cmhaltpkg. The service that invokes the function fails at this point and the SGeRAC package
manager fails the corresponding RAC database MNP instance.
How Serviceguard Extension for RAC Toolkit interacts with storage management
subsystems
The core concept of the Toolkit, namely, configuring an MNP for Oracle Clusterware and for each
RAC database and configuring a dependency of each RAC database MNP on the Oracle
Clusterware MNP holds true across the following storage management options supported by
SGeRAC: SLVM, CVM, ASM over raw device (on HP-UX 11i v3) and CFS. The above dependency
may not hold well if ASM over SLVM is used as a storage option for RAC databases. Beginning
with the SGeRAC A.11.19 patches, PHSS_40885 (11i v2) and PHSS_40886 (11i v3), SGeRAC
toolkit introduces a new ASMDG MNP package to decouple ASM disk group management from
OC MNP. In previous toolkit versions, RAC database shared volume groups used for ASM disk
groups were defined in the OC MNP. However, the Storage management option deployed will
have some impact on the configuration of the toolkit.
Use Case 1: Oracle Clusterware storage and database storage in SLVM/CVM
Figure 15 Use Case 1 Setup
Serviceguard Extension for RAC Toolkit operation 109