This chapter provides information about the components that are added to the base IRIS FailSafe 2.0 product by the IRIS FailSafe 2.0 Oracle option. It assumes that you are familiar with the basic components of IRIS FailSafe described in Chapter 1 of the IRIS FailSafe 2.0 Administrator's Guide . This chapter also lists the steps you must take to add Oracle databases to the highly available services that are failed over on an IRIS FailSafe cluster.
The major sections in this chapter are as follows:
The IRIS FailSafe Oracle option adds database support to the IRIS FailSafe base software. The database monitoring scripts monitor the Oracle database. If the monitor script detects a failure, it will report a local monitoring failure to FailSafe, and FailSafe will take the appropriate action. Figure 1-1 shows an example of the message paths in IRIS FailSafe.
The standard Oracle startup and shutdown scripts, $ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbstart and $ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbstop, cannot be used with IRIS FailSafe. You must use scripts that you develop by starting with the following two sample scripts:
/var/cluster/ha/resource_types/Oracle_DB/startup_oracle.sample /var/cluster/ha/resource_types/Oracle_DB/shutdown_oracle.sample |
A key difference between the standard scripts and IRIS FailSafe scripts is that the standard scripts start up and shut down all Oracle databases. IRIS FailSafe scripts start up or shut down just one Oracle instance (one Oracle server accessing one Oracle database), the one identified by $ORACLE_SID.
For each type of script (startup and shutdown), you can use any combination of the following strategies:
Write one script that takes the database instance as an argument (which IRIS FailSafe passes as an environment variable). Use it to start up (or shut down) each database instance.
Use different startup (or shutdown) scripts for different database instances.
Use scripts with the same pathnames on each node, but different contents. For example, the startup script for an Origin2000 that is a primary node might be different from the startup script on a backup node that is an Origin200.
To configure an IRIS FailSafe cluster for failover of Oracle databases, follow these steps:
Install, configure, and test the base IRIS FailSafe software as described in the IRIS FailSafe 2.0 Administrator's Guide .
Install additional software if required. See the section “Required Software” in Chapter 2.
Choose how to configure Oracle software and databases on the disks. See the section “Planning Oracle Configuration” in Chapter 2.
Prepare the Oracle startup and shutdown scripts. See the section “Customizing the Oracle Startup and Shutdown Scripts” in Chapter 2.
Add the Oracle resource type, resource attribute, and resource information to the configuration database (CDB) file. See the section “Adding Oracle Resource Information to the Configuration Database (CDB)” in Chapter 2.
Install the Oracle startup and shutdown scripts on each node. See the section “Installing Startup and Shutdown Scripts” in Chapter 2.
Test Oracle failover. See the section “Testing the Oracle Resource” in Chapter 2.