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?
• 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?
• Would we risk corrupting our data if we accidentally started the second instance?
• Are there any Oracle licensing issues?

Thanks,
Peter Schauss

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