RE: 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.

...I'm not trying to pick on anyone, but I felt like I was in a time warp. I had to double check to see if it isn't currently 1994 or so. You can do all this with any shared disk (e.g., NFS or CFS) or even without shared disk. In that case you'd have to fsck and mount the database files over on the other node in the event of a failover. Once you have the database so that either node can "see" it, you need to set up probing for health and scripts to startup/shutdown. This can be really crude/simple or elegant. There is no shortage of software out there for this (e.g., Sun Cluster, VCS). You can even do this with CRS since you can script probes (or check scritps as they are called) and start/stop scripts and register them with CRS and away you go. I blogged about that last bit some time ago:
http://kevinclosson.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/oracle-clusterware-for-non- rac-ha-what-you-say/

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