Oracle Data Guard over VCS 6.0
Hello experts.
It's being almost a month testing and digging on the VCS documentation regarding "Data Guard and Oracle agents supported by Veritas".
The first I can say, documentation is incomplete, confusing and it assumes many things which is a REAL PAIN for a newbie.
Anyhow, after weeks of issues and spending hours trying to understand who the whole thing works together, I still have many questions.
Scenario:
- 2 Linux RH6 physical nodes
- Oracle 11.2.0.4 and Data Guard configured. This is all SINGLE INSTANCE.
- NO SHARED storage!
I read the full documentation regarding Oracle Data Guard Agents for Veritas which was pretty much a real challenge.
Questions I have:
- Why Netlsnr agent shuts down my listener? Switchover fails because of that. I had to remove the Netlsnr resource and monitor.
- How can I perform a smooth switchover from VCS using OraDG and OraDGBroker agents? It's pretty amazing why this information is not provided on the document.
- Is it there any other complete documentation regarding OraDG and OraDGBroker operation? It says "agent supports this or that" but it wont tells you the details "how" or "how to make sure this or that happens", or exactly "when". It's really vague.
There is an example of what "vague" means. This is a portion of the document:
Note: For activateStandby, deactivateStandby, flashbackRecover, SnapshotOn, and SnapshotOff action functions, you must increase the values of the ActionTimeout and MonitorInterval attributes for OraDG and OraDGSnap types before running.
To "increase" them. Right. How much??? I found some values on another document but not sure why I have to do this or how to confirm the values are good. There are many other examples like this which makes VCS and Oracle implementation a pain.
Thanks for any help you can give me. Ask me for any information and I'll provide it.
Alex.
I configured the Oracle DG agent about 3 years ago and it worked fine, but I agree the documentation is not great. I don't know that much about Oracle, but my understanding from the "About the agent for Oracle Data Guard" is that:
- Data Guard agent is used for single instance Oracle for all versions and this uses SQL *Plus to control Oracle DG.
- Data Guard Broker agent is used for RAC but can also be used for single instance Oracle since 11gR2
So if this understanding is correct, as you are using single instance 11gR2, then you have choice of using EITHER Data Guard agent or Data Guard Broker agent, but you should not use both, as you have done.As to which agent you should use, I guess this is an Oracle question, but it would be useful if the agent guide gave some direction on this.When you had your listener resource configured, did you make Oracle resource depends on the Listener resource as in the agent guide.Have you tested Oracle DG outside of VCS control - it it doesn't work outside of VCS control, then VCS won't be able to get it to work either. If it works outside of VCS control, but not in VCS, then look at engine_A.log and OraDG_A.log and post any errors.As an aside, I would not set EnvFile = "/home/oracle/.profile" - this is bad HA practice as if someone changed the .profile this could break VCS (so for instance I have seen a DBA add a menu to .profile to choose what dabase they wanted to log into and this change would break VCS if they had used .profile in VCS).Mike