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Oracle 10G RAC

updated Aug 22, 2007 6:10 am | 17,840 views

Here is a location to create content about that feature known as RAC. I have specifically
mentioned 10G as whilst there is 9i RAC installations no one would at present be
considering to build one for a number of reasons. 9i is an old product and RAC in
10.2.0.3 is a lot easier to implement.

Contents [Hide TOC]

• 1 Why use RAC


• 2 RAC Concepts
o 2.1 Introduction
o 2.2 Shared Storage
• 3 RAC Troubleshooting
o 3.1 Introduction
o 3.2 RAC Building Blocks
 3.2.1 Hardware

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Why use RAC
There is a number of reasons to use RAC The ability to use commodity hardware to scale
your application, as your business grows so does your RAC installation to accommodate
that growth. High Availability - with the right hardware you are able to deliver high
availability and only require minimal downtime for patching in some cases. Your disaster
recovery options are extended using Extended RAC; Data Centres can be up to 100 km
apart(physical limitation of timing constraints) Ability to offload non critical business
process to alternate node using services allowing different nodes to be utilised differently
when different workload characteristics are in effect. This will minimise the impact of
some processes on the online users

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RAC Concepts
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Introduction

Oracle Real Application Clusters RAC has a number of concepts that need to be
understood to maximise the understanding of RAC. The include:

• Shared Storage
• Cache Fusion
• Nodes
• Instances
• Services

Without a proper understanding of these concepts, the DBA will have difficulty with
troubleshooting their cluster.

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Shared Storage

RAC requires shared storage as there is only one physical copy of the data, of which
multiple instance can access to allow scalability of the number of connections to the
database. At all times there is only ever one copy of the data in the database, this doesn't
not preclude undo and redo that is inconsistent to the current overall view. The shared
storage may be in a SAN, NAS with NFS, Direct Attached Storage. SANS are attached
via Fibre Channel HBA cards, NAS over a network and Direct attached will be likely
with SCSI. Depending on the technology SAN and NFS are the most common, you will
need some sort of cluster software to allow the common presentation of the storage to
your cluster nodes.

Cluster Software. Oracles Clusterware or products like Veritas Volume Manager are
required to provide the cluster support and allow each node to know which nodes belong
to the cluster and are available and with Oracle Cluterware to know which nodes have
failed and to eject then from the cluster, so that errors on that node can be cleared. Oracle
Clusterware has two key components Cluster Registry OCR and Voting Disk. The cluster
registry holds all information about nodes, instances, services and ASM storage if used, it
also contains state information ie they are available and up or similar. The voting disk is
used to determine if if a node has failed, i.e. become separated from the majority. If a
node is deemed to no longer belong to the majority then it is forcibly rebooted and will
after the reboot add itself again the the surviving cluster nodes.

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RAC Troubleshooting
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Introduction

Oracle Real Application Clusters RAC has some unique complexities that increase the
degree of effort that is required to troubleshoot the issues that possibly going to happen.
There are multiple layers where you may have problems that manifest themselves as
problems to the end users of your database. The areas are as follows:

• Each Server will need to be dealt with at the OS level and hardware.
• SAN - You will have some sort of shared storage, most likely a SAN, but could
be something else, NFS, or Direct Attached Storage.
• Cluster Software
• ASM - Automatic Storage Management This is optional, however unless you are
already heavily invested in other similar technologies, it is recommended
• Database Instance

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RAC Building Blocks

Here we can look at some of the elements at each level we need to deal with
troubleshooting of our RAC

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Hardware

Hardware is our building blocks and as such a failure to choose wisely will have
implications on various aspects of the RAC installation. Elements to consider is vendor
DELL HP, Sun and others. Then we have our SAN HP, EMC, Sun and once again many
others. Oracle provides us with regularly updating lists of supported hardware for our
production environment. We should ideally build a test environment utilising the same
hardware so as to be able to replicate issues and also to determine the problems that
might arise during or as a result of patching. That is its no good having 2 Linux Servers
on HP attached to NFS, because it was cheaper, When our production system is Solaris
10 in Sun Servers with an EMC SAN. We also need to make sure we can operate with
sufficient network adaptors and have capacity for sufficient HBA cards for our SAN
fabric assuming we use a SAN

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