RE: Active/Passive "high availability"

I had a Sun HA cluster setup a few years ago with Oracle 8i (8.1.3 I think).  

Answers below.

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From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Schauss, Peter Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 2:25 PM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Active/Passive "high availability"

My manager is proposing to cluster two Solaris 5.9 servers in order to create a "high availability" solution. At this stage he is a bit unclear as to what software he would be using for the cluster, but he does not envision purchasing any additional licenses from Oracle. Our Oracle version is 8.1.7.4.

His idea is to have an Oracle instance running on one box and a second Oracle home on the second box, but not running. In the event of a failure on the active box, we would start the Oracle instance on the other one to minimize down time.

Aside from my questions about what this configuration actually accomplishes, my concerns would be:

• Assuming that all of the data files are on the shared disk, would this approach actually work?

Yes, works great.

• The password file is normally stored in $ORACLE_HOME/dbs. If we have two of them do they need to be synchronized? Is there anything else in the dbs directory which needs to be synchronized?

Yes they do. I had a crontab set up that would check the timestamps between the nodes and if the standby was out of date, copy it over.

• Would we risk corrupting our data if we accidentally started the second instance?

Yes. If memory serves, I don't think you can mount the instance on both servers at the same time. Of course, YMMV.

• Are there any Oracle licensing issues?

I don't remember this one. I don't think so, because the fail over server is not running the DB instance. Check with your sales guy.

Thanks,
Peter Schauss

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