Using Serviceguard Extension for RAC, 9th Edition, September 2010

• RAC GCS (cache fusion) traffic may be very high, so an additional dedicated heartbeat
network for Serviceguard needs to be configured.
• Some networks, such as Infiniband, are not supported by CFS/CVM, so the CSS-HB/RAC-IC
traffic may need to be on a separate network that is different from SG-HB network.
• Certain configurations for fast re-configurations requires a dual Serviceguard heartbeat
network, and CSS-HB/RAC-IC does not support multiple networks for HA purposes.
• In a multiple database configuration, RAC-IC traffic of one database may interfere with
RAC-IC traffic of another database; therefore, the RAC-IC traffic of databases may need to
be separated.
In the above cases, you will see a longer time to recover some network failures beyond those
protected by primary and standby, unless Serviceguard is configured to monitor the network.
A failure of CSS-HB/RAC-IC network in such configuration does not force Serviceguard to reform
the cluster. If Serviceguard is not configured to monitor the network, Oracle will take at least
CSS misscount time interval to resolve the network failure. The default value of CSS misscount
in SGeRAC configurations is 600 seconds.
To avoid longer recovery times, manage Oracle Clusterware and RAC-DB instances using
Serviceguard multi-node packages. In addition, configure the CLUSTER_INTERCONNECT_SUBNET
package configuration parameter (as done with a standard SUBNET package configuration
parameter) in the respective multi-node packages to monitor the CSS-HB/RAC-IC networks.
Planning Storage for Oracle Cluster Software
Oracle Cluster Software requires shared storage for the Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR) and a vote
device. Automatic Storage Management cannot be used for the OCR and vote device in prior
Oracle 11gR2 versions because these files must be accessible before Oracle Cluster Software
starts.
For Oracle 10g, the minimum required size for each copy of the OCR is 100MB and for each vote
disk it is 20MB. For Oracle 11gR1, the minimum required size for each copy of the OCR is 280MB,
and for each vote disk it is also 280MB.
The Oracle OCR and vote device can be created on supported shared storage, including SLVM
logical volumes, CVM raw volumes, and CFS file systems (on HP-UX releases that support
Veritas CFS and CVM). See “About Veritas CFS and CVM from Symantec” (page 18). Oracle
11gR2 supports OCR and vote device on ASM over SLVM, ASM over raw device files, and Cluster
File System (CFS).
Planning Storage for Oracle 10g/11gR1/11gR2 RAC
NOTE: The Oracle 11gR2 OUI allows only ASM over SLVM, ASM over raw device files, Cluster
File System for Clusterware files, and Database files.
Volume Planning with SLVM
Storage capacity for the Oracle database must be provided in the form of logical volumes located
in shared volume groups. The Oracle software requires at least two log files for each Oracle
instance, several Oracle control files and data files for the database itself. For all these files,
Serviceguard Extension for RAC uses HP-UX raw logical volumes located in volume groups that
are shared between the nodes in the cluster. High availability is achieved by using high availability
disk arrays in RAID modes. The logical units of storage on the arrays are accessed from each
node through multiple physical volume links (PV links, also known as alternate links), which
provide redundant paths to each unit of storage. Fill out a Logical Volume worksheet to provide
logical volume names for logical volumes that you will create with the lvcreate command.
The Oracle DBA and the HP-UX system administrator should prepare this worksheet together.
Create entries for shared volumes only. For each logical volume, enter the full pathname of the
32 Serviceguard Configuration for Oracle 10g, 11gR1, or 11gR2 RAC