If you couldn't make it to Oracle Open World in San Francisco (12th - 15th October) I've put together a quick summary of the presentations and demonstrations that my colleagues and I delivered.

The Solaris Cluster group was given two speaking sessions for the conference:

1.  "Bulletproof Your Oracle E-Business Suite Deployment with Solaris Cluster" - Neil Garthwaite and Pedro Lay
2. "Delivering High Availability to Oracle Applications with Solaris Cluster" - Dr Ellard Roush and Tim Read

Neil and Pedro's presentation explained how you could combine Solaris Cluster and Sun Cluster Geographic Edition to create a high availability Oracle's E-Business Suite implementation that also has disaster recovery protection.

The underlying 10g RAC database runs in the global zone and is replicated by Oracle Data Guard to a secondary cluster. The application tier comprising concurrent manager and Oracle Process Manager and Notification Server (opnm) managed services (oafm, forms, oacore and http server) runs in a separate, isolated Solaris Containers cluster, also known as a zone cluster. Using the features of Solaris Cluster and Geographic Edition both local failover and disaster recovery can be achieved without the need to re-run autoconfig.

The picture above shows the configuration demonstrated at Oracle Open World with the exception that shared QFS was used in place of ASM. 

The presentation was backed up by a real implementation using two physically separate clusters. During the show we performed numerous demonstrations. These included local failovers, caused by forcing zone or process failures, and full site switchovers to test the disaster recovery plan. Whereas local failover took only a matter of a few seconds, the site switchover took around 15 minutes to complete, albeit on a somewhat untuned system. On the final day we initiated a full disaster scenario by powering off both of the primary cluster nodes. The takeover of the primary site completed successfully in around 10 minutes. And just to re-iterate, at no point did we need to re-run autoconfig, whether we performed a failover, switchover or site takeover.

Throughout these demonstrations we used Load-Runner to place a background load on the system and give an indication of interactive performance.

Keep an eye out for videos of this setup on the Sun Learning Exchange.

The second presentation given by Ellard and me came in two parts. The first covered how Solaris Containers clusters can be used to consolidate workloads onto a Solaris Cluster with both security isolation and resource constraints. The second part described how a new resource type, or agent, could be written to support an application for which Sun doesn't currently have an offering. The example used in the presentation was Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.

Other Solaris Cluster demonstrations at the Sun booth included: HA-ASM, a new agent for managing Oracle ASM, running in a zone cluster and Oracle 11g RAC running over RDS on Infiniband on SPARC servers using Sun's QDR PCIe HCAs and the 36-port switch.

Now if you were at Oracle Open World but didn't sign up to attend our presentations (and look what you've missed!) then you can still access copies of the slides and listen to the recording of the above sessions.

Maybe we'll see you at OOW next year!

Tim Read
Solaris Cluster Engineering