HP Serviceguard Oracle DataGuard Toolkit User Guide, April 2011

2 Serviceguard support for Oracle Data Guard
Providing high availability for ODG is essential for mission-critical businesses that require ODG
to be deployed in an environment that has a wide range of applications. Integrating ODG with
Serviceguard using the toolkit has the following additional advantages:
1. Provides high availability for Data Guard processes and the Data Guard broker (if used) for
both, primary and the standby databases. Serviceguard has built-in monitoring capabilities
to monitor system resources like network, volume groups, and file systems, and also to initiate
failover following detection.
2. Data Guard provides disaster protection and recovery only for Oracle databases. Data Guard
integration with Serviceguard Extended Distance Cluster (EDC), Metrocluster, or
Continentalclusters provides disaster protection and recovery for Oracle databases for the
applications that use the databases. Serviceguard has extensive dependencies that allow
these application support systems to be built-in for a complete environment/deployment. This
is advantageous from the complete application stack, as opposed to accounting for the Oracle
Database alone.
3. Serviceguard’s robust failover mechanism can be extended to provide reliable automatic Data
Guard role management (failover and switch over) operations.
4. Serviceguard is integrated with Matrix Operating environment —VSE for Integrity Servers.
This enables workload management, Instant Capacity, and other VSE technologies to be
controlled with Serviceguard. The ODG toolkit integration similarly allows the users to take
advantage of these capabilities for failure scenarios that affect ODG replication.
The Serviceguard toolkit for Oracle Data Guard consists of a set of shell scripts that are used to
start, stop, and monitor ODG primary and standby database instances. In the case of a
single-instance database, this toolkit leverages scripts from the ECMT Oracle Toolkit to start, stop,
and monitor the database, the listener, and the ASM instances.
In an Oracle RAC environment, the toolkit leverages scripts from SGeRAC toolkit to start, stop, and
monitor the RAC databases.
Features of the Toolkit for Oracle Data Guard
1. The toolkit starts, stops, and monitors the databases (single-instance and RAC) that are protected
by ODG. These databases are:
• Primary Database
• Physical Standby Database
• Logical Standby Database
2. It supports Active Data Guard. Oracle's Active Data Guard is a new feature for Oracle 11g
which needs an optional license from Oracle. It enables read-only access to a physical standby
database for queries, sorting, reporting, Web-based access, and so on. It also applies the
changes received from the production database.
3. It provides high availability for Data Guard Broker (in an RAC environment only). The Data
Guard broker is a distributed management framework that automates the creation, maintenance,
and monitoring of Data Guard configurations.
4. It supports Real Time Apply for Standby Databases. Real Time Apply enables Log Apply
Services to apply redo data as it is received, without waiting for the current standby redo log
file to be archived. This results in faster switch over and failover times.
5. It supports toolkit maintenance mode.
Features of the Toolkit for Oracle Data Guard 5