RE: Active/Passive "high availability"

If he is using a supported file system clustering solution from Oracle, such as Sun or Veritas, this architecture COULD work (and these are not cheap, and they are not simple to implement).

We actually have built some similar systems for our hosting customers running 8.1.7. The only advantage you get is if the primary box is damaged or corrupted in some way, you can "failover" to the alternate. We have had minimal success with automating the failover process, however. A lot of times, whatever time savings you might have had gets eaten up in analyzing the problem and deciding to failover or simply restart after the root cause is resolved. Because of the limitations and ancient nature of this architecture, you'd be much better off trying to convince him to use a standby solution from Oracle. It is simple, effective, supported by the vendor, and accomplishes nearly the same thing, albeit with possible additional disk cost.

And oh yeah, if you have Oracle software on two boxes, whether you run them or not, be prepared to negotiate payment for two licenses.

And yes, you would need two separate password files, though I doubt you could corrupt the data if the second instance started up, it would fail.

If your boss is like mine, when vague solutions are suggested, I just pretend to be interested and wait to see if he formalizes the request. Chances are, unless someone is driving him to this solution, you'll hear nothing more about it. But still, the standby solution is something you ought to be recommending yourself, if you don't already have one. It's your job!

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Schauss, Peter Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 3:25 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?
• 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

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l


--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l