Configuring Oracle Database Appliance and Dbvisit Standby v9

Introduction

The examples provided are of Dbvisit Standby Version 8.0.x, there should not be any changes on how this is being implemented in Dbvisit Standby Version 9.0

An Oracle Database Appliance X6 is similar in many ways to an Exadata, in that it is a pre-tuned machine built to run Oracle databases.
But the cost of buying one of these machines is far less than that of it's Exadata cousin. And with the launch of the X6 series last year, it is the first
the engineered system to support Oracle Standard Edition.
The X6-2S that is used for testing is optimized to run Single Instances and this entry level machine is very appealing to small and medium businesses.
A summary of the details for both parts is shown in the table below:

	Primary		Standby	Cloud Standby
Machine Name	ODAS1		ODAS2	DBVCLD01
Type	ODA X6-2 S		ODA X6-2 S	Oracle Database as Service (DBaaS)
OS	REL 6		REL 6	REL 6
Oracle Version	12.1.0.2 Standard Edition		12.1.0.2 Standard Edition	12.1.0.2 Standard Edition
Databases	DBV1	DBV2	DBV1	DBV2
CDB / Non-CDB	CDB	Non-CDB	CDB	Non-CDB
DB Storage	ASM	ACFS	ASM	ACFS
Dbvisit Standby	8.0.14.19191	8.0.14.19191	8.0.14.19191	8.0.14.19191

1. Configuring Dbvisit Standby v8 between a Primary and Standby Oracle Database Appliance (ODA)

The steps required to configure Dbvisit Standby between two ODA machines are similar to a non-ODA setup. However, there are a couple of quirks that need to be kept in mind and we will explore these later on.
Having access to two 'blank' ODA X6-2 (The Dbvisit ODA Datasheet here) machines with just the OS pre-installed to perform some tests. So we could create 2 new Oracle Databases. Knowing we wanted to demo ODA to Oracle Cloud in a separate test, we decided to create an Oracle 12c CDB database with ASM storage (DBV1) and an Oracle 12c non-CDB database with ACFS filesystem storage (DBV2). This was in order to demonstrate as much of the functionality as possible.

During the database creation, as a part of the database create job SSH equivalence is set for oracle user for both the nodes and this is removed as soon as the database is created, So if you are using SSH instead of dbvnet for the Dbvisit Standby, please take a backup of the keys before creating the database using odacli. You can restore the keys once the database creation is completed.

We would recommend using dbvnet to avoid the above issue.

The issue has been raised with Oracle on this issue 28399738 has been logged with development for this issue. The fix for this issues is planned to be included in the next release 18.7

After logging into the management URL

creating a Database in ODA couldn't be easier. You simply click 'create database' from the Oracle Database Appliance, Databases tab.

The graphic below shows the creation of the first of the 2 databases DBV1 (12c CDB with ASM).

Once the "Create" button is pressed, the screen displays a creation job that can either be monitored as root via the command line tool (odacli) or graphically via a job.

The creation of the database also generates an Oracle Home. The Oracle Homes for the primary databases are created (if you choose to have 2 instead of 1) with each database creation. However, on the Standby host, if there are not yet any databases there will be no Oracle Homes. Keep this in mind and we'll cover this point again later when creating the Standby DDC.
At this time, we choose to also create the 2^nd Database DBV2, opting to create a 2^nd Oracle Home and having ACFS as the storage option.

Once these databases were created, we can also view both of them and their associated storages from the command line utility (odacli).

[root@odas1 ~]# odacli list-dbstorages
ID Type DBUnique Name Status
---------------------------------------- ------ -------------------- ----------
a33565f6-af30-4bff-a4ea-cb7b71beead0 Asm DBV1 Configured
8847001e-f209-4c4d-a39f-1b50e5707ff3 Acfs DBV2 Configured 
[root@odas1 ~]# odacli describe-dbstorage -i a33565f6-af30-4bff-a4ea-cb7b71beead0
DBStorage details
----------------------------------------------------------------
ID: a33565f6-af30-4bff-a4ea-cb7b71beead0
DB Name: DBV1
DBUnique Name: DBV1
DB Resource ID: f4ff4bb5-f102-4bef-8865-e05b4f777711
Storage Type: Asm
DATA Location: DATA
RECO Location: RECO
REDO Location: RECO
State: ResourceState(status=Configured)
Created: July 25, 2017 1:44:09 AM CEST
UpdatedTime: July 25, 2017 1:44:10 AM CEST 
[root@odas1 ~]# odacli describe-dbstorage -i 8847001e-f209-4c4d-a39f-1b50e5707ff3
DBStorage details
----------------------------------------------------------------
ID: 8847001e-f209-4c4d-a39f-1b50e5707ff3
DB Name: DBV2
DBUnique Name: DBV2
DB Resource ID: 204fd4e5-ce81-4845-a027-5d154594a599
Storage Type: Acfs
DATA Location: /u02/app/oracle/oradata/DBV2
RECO Location: /u03/app/oracle/fast_recovery_area/
REDO Location: /u03/app/oracle/redo/
State: ResourceState(status=Configured)
Created: July 25, 2017 2:11:10 AM CEST
UpdatedTime: July 25, 2017 2:11:43 AM CEST 
[root@odas1 ~]# odacli list-databases
ID DB Name DB Version CDB Class Shape Storage Status DbHomeID
---------------------------------------- ---------- ------------ ------ -------- -------- -------- ------------ ---------------------------------------
f4ff4bb5-f102-4bef-8865-e05b4f777711 DBV1 12.1.0.2 true OLTP odb1 ASM Configured 6b4bd46b-6fea-473d-a49e-4dca8b9fdaa8
204fd4e5-ce81-4845-a027-5d154594a599 DBV2 12.1.0.2 false OLTP odb1 ACFS Configured ac865770-d73d-4afe-9cb9-a27f48d99e0

With these created, it's worthwhile to now consider the standby node. Here, we need to pre-create both the standby database storage and add an Oracle Home. In order to demonstrate both the ease of using the command line and the GUI, we decided to create both the storage and the new Oracle Home from the command line as shown below.

If you are running later versions of ODA the steps for preparing standby server are bit different than on X6. The preparation of Standby server before installing Dbvisit Standby product is following:

Create Database Home with command:

odacli create-dbhome -v 12.1.0.2.170418 -de SE

Create Instance with instance-only option:

odacli create-database -u DBV1 -n DBV1 -m -r ASM -dh 8de7a0d0-f916-485e-bac4-7a4e392d7f0b -io

Storage and database resource will be created. New Instance will be started in NOMOUNT mode on standby server.

You need to shutdown the instance manually:

export ORACLE_SID=DBV1
sqlplus "/as sysdba"
SQL> shu abort;

No further steps with odacli are needed on the standby server and you can proceed with Dbvisit Standby installation

NOTE: by default the new standby database shape is set to "odb1" and this can't be changed, but it's not an issue since memory is defined by standby DB startup parameters and CPU limitation is not effective without resource manager (which is not available on SE). Redo log size is also carried over from the primary.

When Having issues registering standby instance with odacli it is also possible to perform graceful switchover with Dbvisit Standby GUI and register the standby instance with odacli when it will have the primary role.