Oracle Database Appliance: Data Guard Configuration Using ODACLI

Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) is a complete and ideal database platform for small, medium, and large-sized database implementations. It incorporates robust, time-tested Oracle technologies, including the world-leading Oracle Database, the best-selling Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) database option, Oracle Clusterware, and Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM). By integrating hardware and software, ODA eliminates the complexities inherent in non-integrated, manually assembled database solutions, reducing deployment time from weeks or months to just a few hours while preventing configuration and setup errors that often result in sub-optimal, hard-to-manage database environments.

Data Protection Using Oracle Data Guard

While the ODA is a highly available system by itself, a standby database environment can provide data protection and reduce planned and unplanned downtime in case the primary database environment becomes unavailable or corrupted. Therefore, a standby database has always been an integral component of Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) to provide additional high availability and data protection for any mission-critical production system. With Oracle (MAA) Gold Tier best practices, the standby database can be synchronized with the primary database, thereby minimizing database downtime for planned maintenance activities, such as database upgrades and unplanned outages, such as data corruptions, database failures, cluster failures, power outage or natural disaster.

With ODA 19.8 Release and later, Oracle Data Guard is integrated with ODA. You can use ODACLI commands to quickly set up and manage Oracle Data Guard with another ODA.

Data Guard Configuration using ODACLI

In the following example, we will configure a Data Guard environment using two Oracle Database Appliance X8-2S and the command line utility ODACLI.

Topology:

Now, let’s configure the Data Guard Environment using ODACLI.

1. Configuring Remote database backup for the source database.

On Primary ODA, create a backup configuration for a non-TDE database.

Creation will take a few seconds, then we can check the status using:

Once created, assign the backup configuration to the source database.

2. Create a Level 0 database backup and keep archive logs.

Verify that the job completed successfully with odacli describe-job.

3. Identify the ID of the backup report that belongs to the L0 backup:

4. Take a backup of the backup report into json format and copy it over to the standby machine.

5. We will work on the standby side now. Double-check if the NFS was configured on the standby side.
6. Restore the database as a standby on the target.

Identify the ID of the home in case an existing home would be used:

Restore the database with the odacli irestore-database command.

Verify that the job completed successfully.

Verify that the new database is in “CONFIGURED” status.

Now, we will return to the ODA primary node.

7. Configure Data Guard from the primary ODA’s first node.

Prerequisites:

1. Listener port(s) and port 7070 must be open to create Oracle Data Guard between two ODAs.
2. Configuring Data Guard would require a 19.15 ODA version when either primary or standby database (or both) were configured on a DBSystem(s).

In the interactive CLI configuration steps, the parameters are as follows:

• The standby site address is the IP address or hostname of the standby host. Provide the fully qualified domain name and hostname if the primary and the standby systems are in the same domain and DNS is configured.
• Select Oracle Data Guard protection modes to meet availability, performance, and data protection requirements. Oracle Data Guard Protection Modes are Maximum Availability, Maximum Performance, and Maximum Protection. The log transport modes are ASYNC, SYNC, and FASTSYNC.
• You can select the following combinations of protection modes and transport types:

“odacli list-dataguardstatus” can help you to verify the status of the current Data Guard configuration.

The same configuration is visible from Data Guard broker:

We have successfully configured a basic Data Guard environment, where most of the standby creation steps are automated using ODACLI commands only.

We can also perform operations as “Switchover” and “Failover” using ODACLI:

To Switchover, execute from any of either server:

# odacli switchover-dataguard -i <Data Guard ID> -u <Standby db name>

To Failover, execute from the standby server:

# odacli failover-dataguard -i <Data Guard ID> -u <Primary db name>

Consider some prerequisites for Oracle Data Guard Configuration on ODA 19.14+:

• Oracle recommends running the primary and the standby databases on separate ODA hardware, so ensure that you have at least two separate ODA machines.
• Oracle recommends that the primary and standby systems have the same ODA configuration, if possible. The databases must have a similar configuration for database shape, version, memory, networking, and storage (both must have either Oracle ASM or Oracle ACFS storage) to avoid unpredictability with the database switch roles.
• The primary and standby systems must be the same ODA release and on ODA release 19.8 or later. The recommended version is 19.14 due to critical bug fixes.
• If you have customized the operating system, ensure that the environments on both machines are identical.