It’s time to Collaborate again!!

Collaborate15_Horizontal_LogoIn a little more than a couple of weeks, the great Collaborate conference will start again.

My agenda will be quite packed again, as speaker, panelist and workshop organizer:

Date/Time Event
08/04/2015
3:15 pm - 4:15 pm
Oracle RAC, Data Guard, and Pluggable Databases: When MAA Meets Oracle Multitenant
IOUG Collaborate 15, Las Vegas NV
08/04/2015
4:30 pm - 5:30 pm
Panel: Nothing to BLOG About - Think Again
IOUG Collaborate 15, Las Vegas NV
12/04/2015
9:00 am - 4:00 pm
RAC Attack! 12c
IOUG Collaborate 15, Las Vegas NV
15/04/2015
5:30 pm - 6:00 pm
IOUG RAC SIG Meeting
IOUG Collaborate 15, Las Vegas NV

 

RAC Attack! 12c

This technical workshop and networking event (never forget it’s a project created several years ago thanks to an intuition of Jeremy Schneider), confirms to be one of the best, long-living projects in the Oracle Community. It certainly boosted my Community involvement up to becoming an Oracle ACE. This year I’m the coordinator of the organization of the workshop, it’s a double satisfaction and it will certainly be a lot of fun again. Did I said that it’s already full booked? I’ve already blogged about it (and about what the lucky participants will get) here.

 

Oracle RAC, Data Guard, and Pluggable Databases: When MAA Meets Oracle Multitenant 

One of my favorite presentations, I’ve presented it already at OOW14 and UKOUG Tech14, but it’s still a very new topic for most people, even the most experienced DBAs. You’ll learn how Multitenant, RAC and Data Guard work together. Expect colorful architecture schemas and a live demo!  You can read more about it in this post.

 

Panel: Nothing to BLOG About – Think Again

My friend Michael Abbey (Pythian) invited me to participate in his panel about blogging. It’s my first time as panelist, so I’m very excited!

 

IOUG RAC SIG Meeting

Missing this great networking event is not an option! I’m organizing this session as RAC SIG board member (Thanks to the IOUG for this opportunity!). We’ll focus on Real Application Clusters role in the private cloud and infrastructure optimization. We’ll have many special guests, including Oracle RAC PM Markus Michalewicz, Oracle QoS PM Mark Scardina and Oracle ASM PM James Williams.

Can you ever miss it???

 

A good Trivadis representative!!

trivadis.com

This year I’m not going to Las Vegas alone. My Trivadis colleague Markus Flechtner , one of the most expert RAC technologists I have the chance to know, will also come and present a session about RAC diagnostics:

615: RAC Clinics- Starring Dr. ORACHK, Dr CHM and Dr. TFA

Mon. April 13| 9:15 AM – 10:15 AM | Room Palm D

If you speak German you can follow his nice blog: http://oracle.markusflechtner.de/

Looking forward to meet you there

Ludovico

Moving Clusterware Interconnect from single NIC/Bond to HAIP

Very recently I had to configure a customer’s RAC private interconnect from bonding to HAIP to get benefit of both NICs.

So I would like to recap here what the hypothetic steps would be if you need to do the same.

In this example I’ll switch from a single-NIC interconnect (eth1) rather than from a bond configuration, so if you are familiar with the RAC Attack! environment you can try to put everything in place on your own.

First, you need to plan the new network configuration in advance, keeping in mind that there are a couple of important restrictions:

  1. Your interconnect interface naming must be uniform on all nodes in the cluster. The interconnect uses the interface name in its configuration and it doesn’t support different names on different hosts
  2. You must bind the different private interconnect interfaces in different subnets (see Note: 1481481.1 – 11gR2 CSS Terminates/Node Eviction After Unplugging one Network Cable in Redundant Interconnect Environment if you need an explanation)

 

Implementation 

The RAC Attack book uses one interface per node for the interconnect (eth1, using network 172.16.100.0)

To make things a little more complex, we’ll not use the eth1 in the new HAIP configuration, so we’ll test also the deletion of the old interface.

What you need to do is add two new interfaces (host only in your virtualbox) and configure them as eth2 and eth3, e.g. in networks 172.16.101.0 and 172.16.102.0)

 

modify /var/named/racattack in order to use the new addresses (RAC doesn’t care about logical names, it’s just for our convenience):

add also the reverse lookup in  in-addr.arpa:

 

restart  named on the first node and check that both nodes can ping all the names correctly:

check the nodes that compose the cluster:

on all nodes, make a copy of the gpnp profile.xml (just in case, the oifcfg tool does the copy automatically)

List the available networks:

Get the current ip configuration for the interconnect:

one one node only, set the new interconnect interfaces:

check that the other nodes has received the new configuration:

Before deleting the old interface, it would be sensible to stop your cluster resources (in some cases, one of the nodes may be evicted), in any case the cluster must be restarted completely in order to get the new interfaces working.

Note: having three interfaces in a HAIP interconnect is perfectly working, HAIP works from 2 to 4 interfaces. I’m showing how to delete eth1 just for information!! 🙂

on all nodes, shutdown the CRS:

Now you can disable the old interface:

and modify the parameter ONBOOT=no inside the configuration script of eth1 interface.

Start the cluster again:

And check that the resources are up & running:

 

 Testing the high availability

Disconnect cable from one of the two interfaces (virtually if you’re in virtualbox 🙂 )

Pay attention at the NO-CARRIER status (in eth2 in this example):

check that the CRS is still up & running:

 

The virtual interface eth2:1 as failed over on the second interface as eth3:2

 

After the cable is reconnected, the virtual interface is back on eth2:

 

Further information

For this post I’ve used a RAC version 11.2, but RAC 12c use the very same procedure.

You can discover more here about HAIP:

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/server.112/e10803/config_cw.htm#HABPT5279 

And here about how to set it (beside this post!):

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/rac.112/e41959/admin.htm#CWADD90980

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/rac.112/e41959/oifcfg.htm#BCGGEFEI

 

Cheers

Ludo

RAC Attack at IOUG Collaborate 2015

Once again this year the RAC Attack will be a pre-conference workshop at Collaborate.

Whether you’re a sysadmin, a developer or a DBA, I’m sure you will really enjoy this workshop. Why?

First, you get the opportunity to install a RAC 12c using Virtualbox on your laptop and get coached by many RAC experts, Oracle ACEs and ACE Directors, OCMs and famous bloggers and technologists.

If you’ve never installed it, it will be very challenging because you get hands on network components, shared disks, udev, DNS, Virtual Machine cloning, OS install and so on, and being super-user (root) of your own cluster!! If your a developer, you can then start developing your applications by testing the failover features of RAC and their scalability by checking for global cache wait events.

If you’re already used to RAC, this year we have not one or two, but three deals for you:

  1. Try the semi-automated RAC installation using Vagrant: you’ll be able to have your RAC up and running in minutes and concentrate on advanced features.
  2. Implement advanced labs such as Flex Cluster and Flex ASM or Policy Managed Databases, and discover Hub and Leaf nodes, Server Pools and other features
  3. Ask the ninjas to show you other advanced scenarios or just discuss about other RAC related topics

 

Isn’t enough?

The participants that will complete at least the Linux install (very first stage of the workshop) will get an OTN-sponsored T-shirt of the event, with the very new RAC SIG Logo (the image is purely indicative, the actual design may change):

t-shirt-c15lv

 

Still not enough?

We’ll have free pizza (at lunch) and beer (in the afternoon), again sponsored by the Oracle Technology Network. Can’t believe it? Look at a few images from last year’s edition:

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IMG_0210

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RACAttackC14LV

Check the pre-conference workshops on the IOUG Collaborate 15 website and don’t forget to full-fill the requirements before attending the workshop:

To participate in the workshop, participants need to bring their own laptop. Recommended specification: a) any 64 bit OS that supports Oracle Virtual Box b) 8GB RAM, 45GB free HDD space, SSD recommended.

Important: it’s required to pre-download Oracle Database 12c and Oracle Grid Infrastructure 12c for Linux x86-64 from the Oracle Website http://tinyurl.com/rac12c-dl (four files: linuxamd64_12c_database_1of2.zip linuxamd64_12c_database_2of2.zip linuxamd64_12c_grid_1of2.zip linuxamd64_12c_grid_2of2.zip). Due to license restrictions it’s not be possible to distribute Oracle Sofware.

Looking forward to meet you there!!!

— 

Ludovico