In this Document

APPLIES TO:

ABSTRACT

Scope and Application:

Grid Control 10.2.0.1 +
All Unix platforms; for Windows use Note 464191.1
This document provides a general reference for Grid Control administrators on configuring 10g Grid Control agents in Cold Failover Cluster (CFC) environments

HISTORY

Last Updated 04-SEP-2010
Expire Date 03-SEP-2010

DETAILS

Overview and Requirements

In order for Grid Control agent to fail over to a different host, the following conditions must be met:

1. Installations must be done using a Virtual Hostname associated with a unique IP address.
2. The virtual hostname used for the group, must be used for any service that runs inside this virtual group. For example: listeners, HTTP servers, iAS etc must use the virtual hostname.
3. Install on a shared disk/volume, which holds the binaries, configuration and runtime data.**
4. Configuration data and metadata must also failover to the surviving node
5. Inventory location must failover to the surviving node
6. Software owner and timezone parameters must be the same on all cluster member nodes that will host this agent

 
An agent must be installed on each physical node in the cluster to monitor the local services. 

Installation and Configuration

A. Setup the Virtual Hostname/Virtual IP Address

The virtual hostname must be static and resolveable consistently on the network.  All nodes participating in the setup must resolve the virtual IP address to the same hostname.  Standard TCP tools such as "nslookup" and "traceroute" can be used to verify the hostname.  Validate using the commands listed below

B. Setup Shared Storage

This can be storage managed by the clusterware that is in use, or you can use any shared file system (FS) volume as long as it is not an unsupported type, such as OCFS V1. The most common shared FS is NFS.

C. Setup the Environment

Before you launch the installer, certain environment variables need to be verified. Each of these variables must be set identical for the account installing the software on ALL machines participating in the cluster:

• OS variable TZ (All cluster member nodes must be time synchronized)
• Timezone setting. It is recommended to unset this variable prior to installation
• PERL variables
• Variables like PERL5LIB should also be unset to prevent from picking up the wrong set of PERL libraries

D. Synchronize OS User ID's

The user and group of the software owner should be defined identically on all nodes of the cluster. This can be verified using the "id" command:

E. Setup Inventory

Each failover group or virtual hostname package should have its own inventory.  Use the same inventory when you install the agent inside each virtual group.  This is accomplished by pointing the installer to the group's oraInst.loc file using "-invPtrLoc" parameter.

F. Install the Software:

1. Run the installer using the inventory location file oraInst.loc as well as specifying the hostname of the virtual group. For example:

runInstaller -invPtrLoc /app/oracle/share1/oraInst.loc ORACLE_HOSTNAME=lxdb.acme.com -debug
(-debug parameter is optional)
(For 11g agents, you must use a response file for silent installations)

2. Continue the rest of the installation normally.

Then bounce the local agent.

You can set this value for each additional agent to avoid startup failures.



G. Startup of Services:

Ensure that you start your services in the proper order:

- establish IP address on the active node
- start all services normally except the agent
- unset all environment variables such as ORACLE_HOME, *LIB*, ORACLE_SID, PERL5LIB etc.
- cd to the agent home / bin directory
- start the agent

In case of failover:

- Establish IP on failover node
- start all services normally except the agent
- unset all environment variables such as ORACLE_HOME, *LIB*, ORACLE_SID, PERL5LIB etc.
- cd to the agent home / bin directory
- start the agent

SUMMARY

If you have a large number of virtual groups to monitor on each cluster node, you may want to consider using only one agent on each cluster node (physical host) and use EMCLI to relocate targets as they failover to other cluster nodes.  

Note 577443.1 How to Setup and Configure Target Relocate using EMCLI

REFERENCES