New Clusterware Project

For the last week, I have been working on our newest project. We are consolidating an application that is currently in pilot mode across several locations. Some of the current databases are SQL Server and some are Oracle. We were brought into the project a little late, but have recovered nicely to work out an architecture that we think will be a good starting point for growing this environment.

I have learned a lot about project teams and technology through this process. I work for Veolia Environmental Services and if you have heard of our company, you know it is huge. We are starting to do Information Systems support for some of our sister companies, and that alone is proving to be a challenge. Trying to meld different corporate cultures is bad enough and then add in the technology layer and it can be really fun! I may cover the culture clashes some other time, but for nowI thought it might be interesting to go over the technology.

We started planning on using Oracle Standard Edition database and Real Application Clusters running on Oracle Enterprise Linux using HP hardware with Intel x86-64 processors. Many of our discussions centered around the version of Oracle and whether or not to implement RAC. We made the decision to stick with Standard Edition even though all of our current implementations are Enterprise Edition because of budgetary concerns. The plan is to move to Enterprise Edition in the future so we can standardize our licensing, but for now, we have a limited budget and are implementing Standard Edition. We also decided to forgo RAC and user Clusterware to protect the databases using active/passive clustering instead of active/active. Our timeline was very short and I have used Clusterware in this fashion before so this helped to shorten the timeline, but we also don't really know how much traffic we are talking about so RAC may not even be necessary.

So we have Clusterware installed and running, Automatic Storage Management is running and storage is allocated, the RDBMS is installed and patched, and we are ready to create the databases. Next comes the fun part... pushing power buttons and pulling power cords to make sure it all works as planned! This has been an incredible learning experience and should continue to be. Next is building our test environment using Oracle VM! Let me know any comments if you have had similar projects or want to chat about what we're doing.

Until next time... keep learning! Oh, by the way, I'm sure there will be lots of good sessions on Clusterware, RAC, Linux, etc at Collaborate 09 this year.