RE: Recommendation for "cheap" HA solution

You can have a single disk array shared by two computers. Each box has its own OS file system(s) which can be on the disk array or on private drives not in the disk array; but all the Oracle stuff is shared on a single set of file systems mounted only by one box at a time. If the primary computer goes down, you can have the secondary mount the database file systems and start the database. The most important thing is to write your failover, startup, and shutdown scripts to make sure that both boxes do not try to run the database at the same time; that will destroy your database. I think the most common setup for automated failover will use a pair of private network connections (i.e. crossover cables) between the two boxes over which the secondary box will perform some sort of test of the primary box; for example, ping. If you don't have a script writer capable of this level robustness, another option is to have scripts to startup and shutdown, and run the scripts manually after verifying that only one box will be running the database.

-----Original Message-----

Hi!
We are looking into establishing some sort of high availability solution here. We are running 9.2.0 on Sun Fire 280 (2 processors). Since we are on a tight budget, we are looking into various solutions for HA.
One option would be to use Sun Cluster Server or Veritas Cluster Server. If one box fails, the db just fails over to the other node. The problem is that we don't have a cluster guy here...
The other Option would be to use RAC, but this is the most expensive solution, I guess...
Does anybody use any other HA solution that is affordable? Failover time should be less than 15 minutes, although "frequent" outages (i.e. once a month or so) are tolerable.
Don't blame me for these requirements; it was not my idea... This is 9.2.0 on Sun Solaris. Received on Thu Jul 24 2003 - 09:48:38 CDT