Grid DBA

Cluster Health Monitor or CHM (formerly IPD/OS) is a utility used to gather OS metrics such as physical memory, swap, CPU usage etc. It's useful for troubleshooting node reboots or evictions, instance evictions as well as poor performance. CHM gathers data in real time with little resource overhead and stores the metrics which can then be retrieved for root-cause analysis. This is very important as other utilities often cannot provide such detailed metrics if there's a resource issue on a node. CHM was bundled with  Grid Infrastructure for Linux and Solaris (x86-64) platforms in 11.2.0.2. However, the feature has now been made available in Grid Infrastructure 11.2.0.3.0 for AIX. After upgrading from 11.2.0.2 to 11.2.0.3 a new resource ora.crf can be seen in the CRS stack. grid@oradba10t[+ASM1]-/home/grid >crsctl stat res -t -init -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NAME TARGET STATE SERVER ...

The Oracle RAC Assurance team has been working on a handy little goody for quite sometime. RACcheck as the name aptly implies turns out to be quite useful at checking your RAC configuration for any issues as well as provides recommendations for correcting them. It checks database, ASM, Grid Infrastructure and Clusterware components as well as infrastructure level components such as OS, storage and network. Setup is straightforward and you can run it as the database installation owner (oracle). Root or sudo privileges are required for some checks. MOS Note 1268927.1 describes it in detail. So far it works on RedHat Linux, AIX, and Solaris SPARC and SuSE Linux. Please note that bash is required for running this utility so if you're using an OS such as AIX which doesn't have bash installed by default you may want to discuss this with your systems administrator. Here's the HTML output of running RAC Check against a 2-node 11.2.0.2.3 cluster running on AIX 6.1. Results are al...

While installing Oracle RAC it is important to setup SSH user equivalence for installation of of the binaries.  Oracle 11gR2 RAC now includes automatic ssh setup. While reading one of my favorite blogs by Martin Bach  he describes using a utility called sshUserSetup.sh for setting up user equivalence for RAC . This takes out some of the repetitive steps needed to setup ssh user equivalence when installing a RAC cluster.  As Martin pointed out you can also use OUI to setup user equivalence but it helps if you can run the cluster verification utility (CVU) to check on many pre-requisites before starting the installation.  During installation using OUI on the AIX platform however, OUI is unable to perform automatic SSH setup. This means that SSH user equivalence will need to be setup manually prior to installation. To ease the setup all you need to do is to run the sshUserSetup.sh script and follow the prompts directions. It takes as parameters the user (oracle or gr...