Oracle Hierarchy Administration Guidelines

Follow these guidelines for administering your Oracle hierarchy:

• Access via protected communication paths. To ensure that users can access the Oracle SID, regardless of the physical system on which it is running, all remote access of the database should be done through the protected Named Pipe (LAN Manager alias) or IP addresses, which are part of the Oracle hierarchy. LifeKeeper automatically makes protected communication paths available on the backup system in case of a switchover.

• Reserve volumes for exclusive Oracle use. Reserve volumes containing the Oracle database files for use exclusively by Oracle. They should not be shared for users to access via LAN Manager, and should not be accessed by any other local applications. This is because LifeKeeper operations that remove a volume resource from service, for example in a failover, can fail if a remote user is accessing one of the volumes over the network or if a local process has done an open for write access on the volume.

Local processes that have read-only access to volumes do not prevent removal of a resource from service, but the read-only access may cause a restore to fail when you attempt to switch the resource back. Examples of processes with read-only access are the Performance Monitor, which periodically polls each volume, or any running process which is installed on the shared volume.

• Start and Stop Oracle Through LifeKeeper. Although much of your administration of Oracle databases is done through the Oracle tools, use the LifeKeeper Out of Service function to stop the Oracle SID and use the In Service function to start the Oracle SID. When LifeKeeper stops and starts the SID, it maintains a consistent view of the server on all nodes in the configuration.

• Protect volume resources before adding to Oracle SID. As your environment grows, if you need to add new volumes to the Oracle SID already under LifeKeeper protection, you should do the following:

1. Protect the volume first (create a volume resource).

2. Add the volume to the SID.

3. Manually create a dependency between the Oracle resource and the volume resource.