Install guide

Chapter 1. Overview
This manual provides a step-by-step installation of Oracle for High Availability (HA) using the Red Hat
Advanced Platform product, Cluster Suite. T his manual provides installation instructions for the following
two scenarios:
Simple RDBMS Enterprise Edition failover
Oracle RDMBS Real Applications Cluster (RAC) on shared GFS file systems
A sample two-node cluster is provided for both installation types. Each installation incorporates best
practices that are both common and specific to the chosen method of Red Hat Cluster Suite HA.
The remainder of this chapter describes the components of the sample installation configurations and
provides general overviews of the configuration issues an Oracle HA installation must address. It is
organized as follows:
Section 1.1, “Oracle Enterprise Edition HA Components”
Section 1.2, “Sample T wo-Node Cluster”
Section 1.3, “Storage Considerations”
Section 1.4, “Storage T opology and DM-Multipath”
Section 1.5, “Fencing T opology”
Section 1.6, “Network Topology Overview”
Note
Installing Oracle for use with Red Hat Cluster Suite HA is complex and requires close
collaboration across the entire IT organization, including development when RAC is deployed. HA
computing is a single platform that must span these departments successfully, in order to achieve
the intended reliability. T he quality of this collaboration cannot be under-estimated.
1.1. Oracle Enterprise Edition HA Components
The first installation scenario this document describes requires Oracle Enterprise Edition HA for Red
Hat Cluster Suite. The second installation scenario this document describes requires the Real
Application Clusters (RAC) option of Oracle Enterprise edition. The following sections summarize these
components and their certification requirements.
1.1.1. Oracle Enterprise Edition HA for Red Hat Cluster Suite
Oracle has supported a simple, exclusive failover, since Oracle7. Customers familiar with HP’s
Serviceguard will recognize this Red Hat Cluster Suite HA configuration.
In this configuration, there are two servers that are licensed to run Oracle Enterprise Edition, but only
one server may access the database at any given time. Oracle refers to this as single-instance, non-
shared operation. Red Hat Cluster Suite ensures isomorphic, or mutually exclusive operation of these
two servers. If both servers access the database simultaneously, corruption may result. Red Hat Cluster
Suite is responsible for ensuring this does not happen. T he Enterprise Edition HA failover case will
assume the file system is ext3, but others are supported.
There are no specific certification requirements for combinations of Red Hat Cluster Red Hat Cluster,
RHEL file systems and Oracle Enterprise Edition HA. Oracle supports any certified, non-local file system
that is supported by Red Hat Cluster Suite. For more information on Oracle HA on Red Hat Cluster Suite,
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Configuration Example - Oracle HA on Cluster Suite
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