Clustering

[Bruce]

I am new to clustering; though I understand the concepts
of building a cluster, I don't know how to make
applications (Oracle) work on top of the cluster.
I have two identical systems (hardware and
configuration) that I want to cluster. If I install
Oracle on each server and then build them in a cluster, is
there any other configuration that I need to do before I
can use Oracle on the cluster rather than on each server
independently?

 

[Phil]

I don't think Oracle will run purely on a Win 2000 cluster.
I believe Oracle RAC needs to have a RAW disk or OCFS
setup to allow access from either node of a RAC cluster.

I suspect that you could get Oracle instances to run in an
Active/Passive Windows cluster, but this would not be
using RAC and the instances should not be attempting to
access the database files at the same time as each
other.

I have a RAC (Active/Active) database running on 2 nodes
and also a backup (RMAN repository ) database which is not
set up in RAC. The backup database can be accessed from
either node, but not at the same time. This is purely in
case of a failure of the 1st node, when we would start up
the backup database service on the 2nd node manually.

 

[Bruce]

Phil,
Thanks for responding. I know about the Oracle RAC,
but I was hoping to build the cluster at the OS level
instead of at the Oracle level.
Doesn't W2K clustering build a virtual server that I
could install Oracle on to run my database instances?
I'm wading into unfamiliar waters here, I don't know
much about Oracle.
Any help/advice would be appreciated.
TIA,
Bruce.

 

[Phil]

I have the reverse problem in that I know a bit about
Oracle but less about windows !

I don't think the Oracle database will like having its
files accessible from multiple servers. If you were able
to stop the oracle services (automatically) on the passive
node and to start them again if a windows cluster failover
took place, then I think that this would be OK.

This is not really clustering of Oracle (in my view), more
a case of failover management. Mind you, that is also my
view of windows clustering.....it's not propper
clustering, just failover management.

As I mentioned previously, I have effectively set this
sort of scenario up (but with manual stop/restart of
Oracle services) and it works fine.

If you were to retain active Oracle services on both
servers at the same time and point both Oracle instances
at the same database files through the cluster ip address
(or equivalent alias), then that would be something
slightly different.
To be honest I'm not sure how Oracle would react, but it
would be interesting to see. My best guess is that Oracle
would not like it as multiple instances are accessing the
same database files and this would only work with RAC in
place. However, windows would not complain because access
to the DB files would only be via one server.

Yep, I reckon that Oracle would object or corrupt in some
way.

Phil