Re: RAC for dev env

I have seen this in several places and it always leads to severe downtime in production. non RAC Dev environments could work for functional development. For performance and concurrency testing and for staiblity testing, you need a RAC environment. Furthermore, I'd suggest you get someone with a lot of experience in RAC before actually going to production with it. Having a TEST/DEV/QA RAC could help you gain that experience.

I cannot speak as to licensing, but if you have the DB up, then it doesn't matter what you use it for... you still have to have a license, at least that is how I understand it.

One suggestion, if you can't get someone with experience... get a couple of virtual machines and toy around with them. You can delete them afterwards, or burn them to DVD and hide them under your desk in case of an audit by Oracle, and still have a RAC sandbox... you wouldn't be able to perform stress tests here, but you can test functionality and the quirks of RAC.

That being said, perhaps reviewing WHY they want RAC would reveal that they actually don't need RAC but a simple DataGuard. I've recently recommended moving from a two-node RAC to a single instance on a better server (better hardware, 64 bit instead of 32 bit and AIX instead of windows) and setting up a DataGuard for fast recovery and minimal data loss

And just a word of advice... never, EVER, use RAC on Windows. Actually... never user windows for a database server...

RAC is like exadata... it's useful only in very specific situations, other than that is just a waste of money and resources.

hth
Alan.-

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 6:30 PM, Ram Raman <veeeraman_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi
>
> A decision has been made by upper management to use RAC for production
> environment and nonRAC for dev/test environments. I would prefer to have a
> parallel environment which is identical to prod. Is it possible to run a
> dev environment without having to worry about license. If license might
> be an issue for dev, can we have one environment where we just install RAC
> for practice before deploying it in production.
>
> Any thoughts or guidances on the issue would be highly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Ram.
>
>

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