About the Author
Kristien Hens is currently working as a Technology System Engineer, focusing on storage and cluster technologies. Before that she worked for four years for Sun Educational Services. She has taught storage and Sun Cluster courses to customers and Sun engineers. She has also developed and taught the courses “Oracle 9i for Sun Engineers” and “Oracle 9i RAC on Sun Cluster 3.x Workshop.” She is coauthor of three Sun BluePrints OnLine articles.
Michael Loebmann has been the local senior systems engineer for the ISV Oracle in Germany for three years. His tasks include both the exchange of technical knowledge between Oracle and Sun and customer consultation with regard to competition. He has been working in the computer field since 1990, and for Oracle since 1993. He has more than nine years of experience with Oracle products, especially in Oracle data warehousing and parallel Oracle databases (OPS and RAC). His specialties include Oracle performance tuning on Solaris and the investigation of database performance on storage subsystems.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The purpose of this Sun BluePrints book is to helps customers and Sun staff to architect and deploy high availability highly available (HA) solutions with Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) in a Sun Cluster 3.x environment. It provides information to help you decide when an Oracle RAC and Sun Cluster software solution is appropriate to satisfy the availability requirements of your business. In addition, this book explains the technology behind these products and provides customer cases of successful deployments, technical tips, and preferred practice recommendations.
After reading this book, you should be able to perform the following tasks:
- Assess the availability requirements of your business
- Choose the correct configuration for your specific HA requirements
- Explain the benefits of implementing Oracle RAC in a Sun Cluster environment
- Provide a high-level view of the Oracle RAC architecture and the Sun Cluster software internal functionality
- Install Oracle RAC in a Sun Cluster environment
- Configure data for use with Oracle RAC
- Manage client connections
- Tune an Oracle RAC and Sun Cluster 3.x solution
To illustrate the benefits, costs, and requirements of various HA solutions, we provide the following detailed case studies:
- A large German bank that has implemented an Oracle RAC and Sun Cluster software solution to meet the ever-increasing business demands of the banking industry.
- One of the largest companies in Europe for alpine skiing that has implemented Oracle RAC and Sun Cluster software to support HA requirements in a consolidated environment.
- A benchmark case that shows how to use Oracle RAC with the Sun’s Remote Shared Memory (RSM) technology to improve performance of single instance databases.
- A large financial institution that uses the Sun Cluster’s HA Oracle agent to provide the necessary level of HA required for their database.
How This Guide Is Organized
This guide is organized in the following chapters:
- Chapter 1 presents a common definition for HA, explains the importance of using accepted processes to assess the availability requirements of your business, and describes some standard business processes used to support HA. In addition, it provides overviews of HA Oracle and Oracle RAC as tools for supporting HA requirements and presents information to help you choose the option that best satisfies your availability requirements.
- Chapter 2 describes the benefits of using Oracle RAC with Sun Cluster software.
- Chapter 3 describes the Oracle RAC architecture and the Sun Cluster software internals and explains how they work together to address HA requirements.
- Chapter 4 provides preferred practice recommendations for implementing Oracle RAC and Sun Cluster software solutions.
- Chapter 5 describes four customer cases that show how customers have successfully implemented Oracle RAC and Sun Cluster solutions to satisfy their unique availability requirements. These cases explain situations in which when an Oracle RAC scenario makes sense and communicates the expert knowledge of customers who have implemented Sun solutions.
- Appendix A provides an historical overview of the continuous development path of parallel database technology, describes the evolution of cache fusion and Sun Cluster software, and explains how these early advancements have affected the current state of database technology.
- Appendix B presents a high-level outline of the areas that should be addressed in a typical service level agreement (SLA) and provides some detail for the areas that are relevant to the discussion of supporting HA.
- Appendix C presents examples for using the scsetup utility.
