HP Serviceguard Toolkits for Database Replication Solutions User Guide, March 2012

2 Serviceguard toolkit for Oracle Data Guard
Overview
The HP Serviceguard toolkit for Oracle Data Guard (ODG) toolkit facilitates easy integration of
Oracle Data Guard (ODG) in an HP Serviceguard cluster for improved high availability and disaster
recovery for an Oracle database. This toolkit contain scripts that manage the ODG primary and
standby database instances. ODG is a host based data-replication software, that replicates data
and provides a comprehensive set of services that create, maintain, manage, and monitor one or
more standby databases. It protects the data from disaster, human error, and data corruption.
ODG maintains these standby databases as consistent copies of the production database. If the
production database is unavailable in case of a planned or an unplanned outage, it allows any
standby database to take over the production role, thus reducing the downtime associated with
the outage. ODG can be used with traditional backup, restoration, and cluster techniques to provide
a high level of data protection and data availability.
Advantages
The ODG toolkit has the following advantages:
• Provides high availability for Oracle Data Guard processes, for both primary and the standby
database.
• HP Serviceguard includes built-in monitoring capabilities to check system resources like network,
volume groups, and files systems. Also, it can initiate a failover in the instance of their failure.
• Provides disaster protection and recovery for Oracle databases, and applications that use the
databases, when integrated with Serviceguard Extended Distance Cluster (EDC), Metrocluster,
or Continentalclusters.
• Integrates Serviceguard with Matrix Operating environment —VSE for Integrity Servers, to
control workload management, Instant Capacity, and other VSE technologies using
Serviceguard.
• Supports Active Data Guard. Oracle's Active Data Guard is a new feature for Oracle 11g
which needs an optional license from Oracle.
• Provides high availability for Data Guard Broker in the RAC environment.
• Supports Real Time Apply for standby Databases.
• Provides high availability in combination with SGeRAC toolkit to the RAC databases in the
Oracle RAC environment.
• Provides high availability in combination with the ECMT Oracle toolkit to the database, the
listener, and the ASM instances in the single-instance database environment.
• Automates failover of primary database to standby database (in a Continentalclusters
environment only) in case of a disaster at the primary database site and when the primary
database becomes unavailable.
• Supports Cluster Verification to identify inconsistencies that may result in package failure
across the package nodes.
• Serviceguard’s robust failover mechanism can be extended to provide reliable automatic Data
Guard role management (failover and switch over) operations.
NOTE: The toolkit does not support role transitions. However, after role transition task is manually
performed, the toolkit detects the new role of the database and monitors the associated processes.
The ODG toolkit supports automatic role transitions only in a Continentalclusters environment when
the primary cluster fails.
6 Serviceguard toolkit for Oracle Data Guard