RE: Active/Passive "high availability"

Seems to me like it should work fine. Checkout the Software Investment Guide (http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/sig.html) for good info on licensing and contact your Oracle sales rep for further questions on licensing since their answer is the only one that really matters. IIRC, you can have Oracle on your 2nd server as described for no extra licensing fee as long as you don't run it for more than 10 days per year.

Why not just put your $ORACLE_HOME on the shared disk too - then you don't have to worry about keeping it syncd. If you don't want to do that, then yes any duplicated files would need to be kept in sync, including your pfile, tns config, patches, etc., or you could just update/recreate them when needed for failover. You could also use a non-default location for these files, or use links from the standard location to your non-default locations.

I'm not sure about the corruption - can't recall for sure if Oracle locks the files so other processes can't open them or not. I'm pretty sure it does on Windows, but not sure about Unix and it might be different for different flavors of Unix. You'd better test to be sure, or just put in some safeguards to make sure nobody starts the second instance.

Regards,
Brandon

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