What's New in RAC Administration?

This section describes the new features for Oracle Database 10g Release 1 (10.1) for Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) administration. The topic in this section is:

• Oracle Database 10g New Features for Real Application Clusters Administration

  
  

  See Also: Oracle Real Application Clusters Installation and Configuration Guide Oracle Real Application Clusters Deployment and Performance Guide Oracle Database New Features Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control Installation and Basic Configuration

Oracle Database 10g New Features for Real Application Clusters Administration

This section describes the Oracle Database 10g features for RAC administration.

• High Availability, Workload Management, and Services

  Oracle Real Application Clusters introduces integrated clusterware known as Cluster Ready Services (CRS). You install CRS on all platforms on which you can run Oracle Real Application Clusters software. CRS manages cluster database functions including node membership, group services, global resource management, and high availability.

  
  

  See Also: Oracle Real Application Clusters Quick Installation Guide to install the ORacle Database 10g Standard Edition with RAC on Windows systems

  In Oracle Real Application Clusters, you can use services to define application workloads by creating a service for each application or for major components within complex applications. You can then define where and when the service runs and thus use services to control your workload.

  In both cluster and non-cluster environments, the Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) tracks performance metrics using services. You can also set thresholds on performance metrics to automatically generate alerts if these thresholds are exceeded.

  
  

  See Also: PL/SQL Packages and Types Reference for more information about the DBMS_SERVICE PL/SQL and DBMS_MONITOR packages and for more information about setting thresholds.

• Enhanced Cluster Manager Implementation

In earlier releases of the Oracle Database, cluster manager implementations on some platforms were referred to as "Cluster Manager". In Oracle Database 10g, Cluster Ready Services (CRS) serves as the clusterware software, and Cluster Synchronization Services (CSS) is the cluster manager software for all platforms. The Oracle Cluster Synchronization Service Daemon (OCSSD) performs some of the clusterware functions on UNIX-based systems. On Windows-based systems, OracleCSService, OracleCRService, and OracleEVMService replace the Oracle Database OracleCMService9i.

Oracle Enterprise Manager, the Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA), and the Server Control (SRVCTL) Utility provide tools to administer clusters, RAC databases, and services.

• Enterprise Manager Enhancements for RAC

  This release includes the new Web-based Enterprise Manager Database Control with which you can manage a RAC database, and Enterprise Manager Grid Control for administering multiple RAC databases. Administration of RAC databases is greatly simplified because of more simplified drill-down tasks and because Enterprise Manager displays cluster-wide performance information. This is available for both single-instance Oracle and RAC databases.

  Enterprise Manager has several summary pages that show cluster database performance information at a glance; you no longer have to log in to each cluster database or display instance-specific pages to obtain a global view of cluster database performance.

• Enhancements for Flash Recovery Area and Automatic Disk-Based Backup and RecoveryA flash recovery area is an Automatic Storage Management (ASM) disk group, a file system, or a directory that serves as a default storage area for recovery files. RAC supports the Automatic Disk-Based Backup and Recovery feature that simplifies managing disk space and backup and recovery files.

• Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) Enhancements

• Use the DBCA to perform instance addition and deletion as well as database deletion.

• Database Upgrade Assistant (DBUA) Enhancements

  Use the DBUA to upgrade from an earlier RAC version to Oracle Database 10g with RAC. When you upgrade from a Primary/Secondary environment, the DBUA creates one service and assigns it to one instance as a preferred instance, and to the other instance as its available instance.

  Server Control (SRVCTL) Enhancements

  Enhancements to SRVCTL support the management of services and Automatic Storage Management (ASM) instances within RAC.

• Enhanced Recovery Parallelism on Multiple CPU Systems

  The default for instance, crash, and media recovery is to operate in parallel mode on multiple-CPU systems.

• Revised Error Messages for High Availability and Management Tools in Real Application Clusters

• The high availability error messages have been enhanced for this release.

• Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR) Enhancements

  The OCR contains configuration details for the cluster database and for high availability resources such as services, Virtual Interconnect Protocol (VIP) addresses, and so on.

• GCS_SERVER_PROCESSES Parameter

  There is a new, static parameter to specify the number of server processes for an instance's Global Cache Service (GCS) for routing inter-instance traffic among RAC instances. The default number of GCS server processes is calculated based on system resources with a minimum of 2. You can set this parameter to different values on different instances.