shutdown abort vs. immediate

We have a Veritas clustered pair of servers running an Oracle based application.
The application only runs on one system at any given time.

Here's the issue:

If the primary system has a hardware error that initiates a Veritas system failover, what are the advantages and disadvantages of using shutdown immediate versus shutdown abort to shutdown Oracle?

Or, if possible, would it be best to have the shutdown script first try a shutdown immediate and then, if that doesn't work, try a shutdown abort?

I think one disadvantage of a shutdown immediate is that it could cause corruption since it performs additional processing on the system that has bad hardware. So best to do a shutdown abort to get off the bad hardware system right away before any more damage is done. Does that make sense?

And a disadvantage of a shutdown abort is that IF the active redo log is also corrupted (though this is unlikely), then the "instance recovery" on the companion system will fail. Is that right? (and how to recover from that? rollforward from a checkpoint???)

Anyone with ideas or experience in this hardware-based system failover/Oracle shutdown scenario?

Thanks Received on Sun Jun 15 2003 - 20:10:18 CDT