RE: Oracle database HA on VMWare without using RAC

Thank you for pointing out the following It doesn't protect you for an HA perspective if the OS/Oracle SW becomes corrupted or your database is corrupted or hard down.

DB corruption risk would still be there even if RAC is used. In my experience with Oracle (and others may have had different experiences and their opinions are based on those experiences), the probability of database corruption is much lower than the probability of physical server crashing. However, on a bad day, all assumptions about probabilities can be thrown into the dust bin.

Based on your experience with VMotion, does it work fine in situations where the underlying server crashes and in those situations, have you ever had any issues with the Oracle's instance crash recovery?

From: dimensional.dba_at_comcast.net <dimensional.dba_at_comcast.net> Sent: Saturday, August 1, 2020 6:59 PM
To: Hameed, Amir <Amir.Hameed_at_xerox.com>; gogala.mladen_at_gmail.com; oracle-l_at_freelists.org Subject: RE: Oracle database HA on VMWare without using RAC

I have used VMotion at a variety of clients for low level fail over's meaning scheduled maintenance, but don't try to VMotion when the database is under heavy load. It doesn't protect you for an HA perspective if the OS/Oracle SW becomes corrupted or your database is corrupted or hard down.

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org<mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org> <oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org<mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org>> On Behalf Of Hameed, Amir Sent: Saturday, August 1, 2020 1:35 PM
To: gogala.mladen_at_gmail.com<mailto:gogala.mladen_at_gmail.com>; oracle-l_at_freelists.org<mailto:oracle-l_at_freelists.org> Subject: RE: Oracle database HA on VMWare without using RAC

Thanks Mladen!
Have you had any experience with using VMWare's VMotion feature to provide HA to Oracle databases? We are looking for a cost effective way to provide HA to an Oracle database. RAC, Veritas, GG are all excellent but expensive options. What I don't know is how effective VMotion is in minimizing the outage time for Oracle databases.

Thanks
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org<mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org> <oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org<mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org>> On Behalf Of Mladen Gogala Sent: Saturday, August 1, 2020 3:51 PM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org<mailto:oracle-l_at_freelists.org> Subject: Re: Oracle database HA on VMWare without using RAC

Standby database or Golden Gate are rather usual options. Other than that, you can setup a Veritas failover cluster for VMWare:

https://www.veritas.com/content/support/en_US/doc/ka6f10000000CAjAAM

You can do the same thing using MSFT cluster:

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.0/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-601-setup-mscs.pdf

There is also VMWare HA:

https://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_ha_wp.pdf

Last, but definitely not least, there is Commvault Live Sync for VMWare. It's sort of standby for VMWare.

https://documentation.commvault.com/commvault/v11/article?p=106002.htm

Virtual machines are disk files. Fail-over clusters move the disk drive to the surviving node and restart the service. There are also hardware based solutions on remote disk replication. Every major SAN vendor (EMC, Hitachi, NetApp) has remote disk replication software, usually for the high end arrays and usually separately licensed. What kind of money are you looking to spend? What is the acceptable switch-over time? Are you looking for the software-only solution, hardware solution or the combination of both? Here is a good article about VMWare high availability:

https://www.nakivo.com/blog/vm-failover-guide/

This is a question for a system architect within your company. The most important question is how much do you want to spend? When you have the $$$ then it's basically testing various commercial solutions, some of which are listed above.

On 7/31/20 11:08 PM, Hameed, Amir wrote: Hi,
I am looking for options/features available in VMWare to provide high-availability to single-instance Oracle databases. If anyone is using VMWare to provide HA solution to their Oracle database, I would appreciate if I could be pointed to the right direction.

Thank you,
Amir

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Mladen Gogala

Database Consultant

Tel: (347) 321-1217

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Sun Aug 02 2020 - 03:17:15 CEST