There is a set of recorded tutorials available from the oracle maximum availability architecture team, that cover a range of topics.
The tutorials can be accessed at Oracle Exadata Best Practices Series
The topics include implementing Ebs, Siebel and Peoplesoft, resource manager, migration, DBFS, monitoring, backup and recovery, troubleshooting, patching and healthcheck.
Lots and Lots of great information.
Often one might have to copy datafiles from one database instance to another (And hence one ASM instance to another), for eg: when copying datafiles from prod to development.
You can use the cp command in asmcmd to accomplish this. cp can copy files from one instance to another. You can specify the username/password@connecstring for the target asm instance in the cp command.
ASMCMD [+] > cp +data/orcl/datafile/EXAMPLE.265.691577295 sys/password@myserver.+ASM:/scratch/backup/myexamples.bak
I have been heads down on an Exadata Poc , and only now, got a chance to browse through the new features in 11.2.0.2. The out of place upgrade feature looks interesting.
This new feature in grid infrastructure installation had me really overjoyed (Anyone who has had the pleasure of configuring IPMP, Auto Port Aggregation, Etherchannel etc (based on the o/s) and setting it up correctly to work with Rac, will understand my Joy) . Starting with 11.2.0.2 you do not have to bond the interfaces (If you have redundant GigE nics you are going to use for your private interconnect) you are going to use as the private interconnect. If you have two different interface names to be used for the private interconnect you can provide both the interface names to the oracle grid infrastructure installer and oracle clusterware will create a Highly Available IP Address (HAIP).
Oracle Clusterware, Rac and ASM uses these load balanced highly available interfaces for communication.
Details can be read at http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E11882_01/install.112/e17212/prelinux.htm#BABJHGBE for Linux.
HAIP info can also be found in the 11R2 Clusterware white paper.
Julian Dyke has a blog post that says that MULTICAST has to be enabled for the Network interfaces to enable this to work.
Enabling multicast on the interconnect network is a requirement with 11.2.0.2 Rac.My Oracle Support Notes 1228471.1,1212703.1 details how Multicast can be enabled and checked.
There are two new awr reports in 11gr2, which will be helpful to dba’s in Real Application Clusters Environments (RAC).
This is a cluster wide awr report, so you can see a lot of the information from all the nodes in the same section, and you can also see aggregated statistics from all the instances at the same time (You can see totals, averages and standard deviations).
This is a cluster wide stats diff report (like you had awrddrpt.sql in 11gr1), comparing the stats differences between two different snapshot intervals, across all nodes in the cluster.
These are huge additions to the awr reports, that enable understanding the database performance in real application clusters environments.
The National Institute of Standards and technology has a good, concise definition of cloud computing. Sushil kumar of Oracle, was using the same language to define cloud computing in an article the current release of the oracle magazine.
If you are attending Oracle Openworld 2009, and are interested in learning a lot about oracle Rac and Grid computing, you can find a full list of Oracle Rac and Grid computing events Here (Starting at page 2 of the pdf doc).
In preparation for the event, you could read the following new 11gR2 white papers from Oracle, to understand the latest developments and arm yourself with questions.
Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g Release 2 Technical Overview
Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g Release 2 Overview of SCAN
Oracle Real Application Clusters One Node 11g Release 2 Technical Overview
Yesterday i completed a 11g Release 2 real application clusters installation on 64 bit Oracle Enterprise Linux 4. The installation process is very similar to the 10g and 11gr1 installations, but much simpler. This was a two node cluster. There are some new concepts that are introduced in 11gR2 real application clusters. Below are some of my notes on 11gr2 new features for Rac and detailed steps that i followed to complete the installation.
Oracle clusterware and ASM now are installed into the Same Oracle Home, and is now called the grid infrastructure install.
Raw devices are no longer supported for use for anything (Read oracle cluster registry, voting disk, asm disks), for new installs.
OCR and Voting disk can now be stored in ASM, or a certified cluster file system.
The redundancy level of your ASM diskgroup (That you choose to place voting disk on) determines the number of voting disks you can have.
You can place
The contents of the voting disks are automatically backed up into the OCR
ACFS (Asm cluster file system) is only supported on Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 (And RHEL5), not on OEL4.
There is a new service called cluster time synchronization service that can keep the clocks on all the servers in the cluster synchronized (In case you dont have network time protocol (ntp) configured)
Single Client Access Name (SCAN), is a hostname in the DNS server that will resolve to 3 (or at least one) ip addresses in your public network. This hostname is to be used by client applications to connect to the database (As opposed to the vip hostnames you were using in 10g and 11gr1). SCAN provides location independence to the client connections connecting to the database. SCAN makes node additions and removals transparent to the client application (meaning you dont have to edit your tnsnames.ora entries every time you add or remove a node from the cluster).
Oracle Grid Naming Service (GNS), provides a mechanism to make the allocation and removal of VIP addresses a dynamic process (Using dynamic Ip addresses).
Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) integration, provides a new mechanism to fence server’s in the cluster, when the server is not responding.
The installer can now check the O/S requirements, report on the requirements that are not met, and give you fixup scripts to fix some of them (like setting kernel parameters).
The installer can also help you setup SSH between the cluster nodes.
There is a new deinstall utility that cleans up a existing or failed install.
And the list goes on an on.
I have broken up the installation process into 3 distinct documents, which can be found below
Installing 11gr2 grid infrastructure
We have been doing some performance testing in the recent days. We were running some workload using an application, capturing awr snapshots every 15 minutes on a 8 node rac cluster. I needed to generate the awr reports between each of the snapshots for each of the nodes. Running awrrpt.sql for each 15 minute intervals for each one of the 8 nodes would have been a tedious task. So i wrote a bash shell script that generates those awr reports.
It takes the database id, instance number, start snapshot id and end snapshot id as arguments (you can query dba_hist_snapshot to find out the start and end snapshot id’s you want to use). The directory in which it generates the reports is hardcoded in the script. The script has to be run as the oracle user and it logs in as sys to generate the reports (You can modify as you need if you want it to be run as a different user). I have tested it only on Linux.
You can run it as ./genawrs.sh dbid instancenumber beginsnap endsnap, to generate the reports. This means that you have to run it once for each instance you need the report for. The script can be found below.
#!/bin/bash
if [ $# != 4 ]
then
echo “Syntax genawrs.sh dbid instanceId startsnapid endsnapid”
exit 1
fil_dbid=$1
l_instid=$2
l_start_snapid=$3
let l_end_snapid=$4-1# For all snapshot id’s
# Set the next snapshot id as current snapshot id + 1
# Spool a log file
# Log into sqlplus and call dbms_workload_repository.awr_report_text
# To generate the awrfor i in `seq $l_start_snapid $l_end_snapid`
do
let l_next_snapid=$i+1;
l_awr_log_file=”/awrs/out/awrrpt_${2}_${i}_${l_next_snapid}.log”sqlplus -s / as sysdba << EOC
set head off
set pages 0
set lines 132
set echo off
set feedback off
spool $l_awr_log_file
SELECT
output
FROM
TABLE
(dbms_workload_repository.awr_report_text
($l_dbid,$l_instid,$i,$l_next_snapid)
);
spool off
EOC
done
In my numerous engagements with customers, assisting them with Oracle Rac installations, i have found that providing the customer with a checklist of tasks to be performed before the installation, and reviewing it with their Database/Server/Storage/Network Administrator’s help in a smooth RAC installation.The checklist only lists the tasks, but does not go into step by step details regarding how to perform the task. For the details, i then point them to the Oracle Installation and Configuration Guides (Links to which can be found in the checklist itself) and relavent metalink notes.
Below are links to the checklists that I use for 11g Installations on Linux and Solaris. All pointers to errors and improvements are welcome.
Oracle Real Application Clusters, 11g Installation Checklist for Solaris