Special Considerations for Oracle

Once the SAP processes are functioning on the systems in the LifeKeeper cluster, resources will need to be created in LifeKeeper for the major SAP functions. These include the ASCS system, the DVEBMSG system, the SCS system and the Oracle database.

This topic will discuss some special considerations for protecting Oracle in a LifeKeeper environment.

• Make sure that the LifeKeeper for Linux Oracle Application Recovery Kit is installed.

• Consult the Oracle Recovery Kit documentation.

• During the installation of SAP, the SAPinst process normally assumes that the database software has already been installed and configured. However, if Oracle is the database to be used with SAP, the SAPinst process will prompt the installer to start the Oracle installation tool (RUNINSTALLER) and complete the Oracle install.

• While installing Oracle during the installation of SAP, an Oracle SID was created. This SID is needed by the Oracle Recovery Kit, so be prepared to supply it when creating the Oracle resource in LifeKeeper.

• When creating a standard SAP installation with Oracle, thirteen separate file systems are created that the Oracle instance will use. Commonly, each of these file systems is built on top of an LVM logical volume and each may contain many separate physical volumes. For LifeKeeper to properly represent these file systems, a separate resource is created for each physical and logical volume and volume group. Since this large collection of resources needs to be assembled into a LifeKeeper hierarchy, it may take some time to complete the creation and extension of the Oracle hierarchy. Do not be surprised if it takes at least an hour for the creation process to complete, and another 10 to 20 minutes for the extension to complete.

• Building the necessary Oracle (and SAP) file systems on top of LVM is not required, and the SAP and Oracle recovery kits in LifeKeeper will work fine with standard Linux file systems.

• The LifeKeeper Oracle Recovery Kit can identify ten of the thirteen file systems the Oracle SAP installation uses as standard Oracle dependencies, and the kit will automatically create dependencies in the hierarchy for these file systems. The Oracle Recovery Kit does not recognize the saptrace, sapreorg and saparch file systems automatically. The administrator setting up LifeKeeper will need to manually create resource dependencies for these additional file systems.