Your choice of replication technology will determine the amount of flexibility you have when creating your new target application environment. For example, if you use host-based replication such as the Oracle's StorageTek Availability Suite, the structure of the underlying volumes that you replicate determines how the volumes will present themselves on your new system. Similarly, storage-based replication products such as EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility or Hitachi Data Systems TrueCopy are similarly restrictive, because the replication process is a physical one, rather than a logical one. In each case, changes to underlying bytes in the volumes under the control of the storage-based replication product are replicated to the new systems.

This restriction, however, is not necessarily the case with application-based replication products. In the example in this series of articles, we replicate an Oracle database using the Data Guard feature of Oracle Active Data Guard. On both clusters, the data is stored on ZFS, but we are not restricted to a like-for-like configuration. The example could have shown how to upgrade to an Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) 11g Release 2 database that stores its data in volumes under the control of Oracle Automatic Storage Management. Doing so would complicate the example, but you might consider such a path yourself. Consequently, if you want to reorganize and optimize your storage, during the upgrade process is the ideal time to do so.

Caution: If you choose to use this article as a guide for performing a similar process, you need to pay close attention to the nodes on which the individual commands are run. For that reason, the system prompts shown in the example steps include both the node name and the user name to indicate both where, and as whom, a command must be run.

To begin the process of setting up your new Oracle Database environment, create the necessary user and group accounts and configure the appropriate project settings on both nodes, as shown in Listing 1. You must ensure that the user account you create has a consistent user ID across all your cluster nodes. This is assumed to be the case in our example.

vzpyrus3a (root) # groupadd oinstall
vzpyrus3a (root) # groupadd dba
vzpyrus3a (root) # useradd -g oinstall -G dba -d /export/home/oracle -m -s /bin/bash oracle
80 blocks
vzpyrus3a (root) # passwd oracle
New Password: 
Re-enter new Password: 
passwd: password successfully changed for oracle
vzpyrus3a (root) # projadd -U oracle user.oracle
vzpyrus3a (root) # projmod -sK "project.max-shm-memory=(privileged,4G,deny)" user.oracle
vzpyrus3a (root) # projmod -sK "project.max-shm-memory=(privileged,4G,deny)" default

Listing 1. Creating User and Group Accounts

Now that you have an Oracle Database user ID, change the ownership of the /oradata mount point so that the Oracle Database user can store data there. Perform this on the node where the resource group oracle-rg is online.

vzpyrus3a (root) # chown oracle:oinstall /oradata

Also, on both zone cluster nodes, create the /u02 directory and change ownership of the /u02 directory to allow you to install the Oracle Database software.

vzpyrus3a (root) # zfs create -o mountpoint=/u02 rpool/u02
vzpyrus3a (root) # chown oracle:oinstall /u02

vzpyrus3b (root) # zfs create -o mountpoint=/u02 rpool/u02
vzpyrus3b (root) # chown oracle:oinstall /u02

Depending on how you installed the Oracle Solaris 11 operating system, you might need to install additional packages before starting the Oracle Database software installation. In our case, we need to add some extra packages, as shown in Listing 2.

vzpyrus3a (root) # pkg install pkg://solaris/developer/build/make \
   	           pkg:/x11/diagnostic/x11-info-clients
           Packages to install: 33
       Create boot environment: No
Create backup boot environment: No
            Services to change:  4

DOWNLOAD                                  PKGS       FILES    XFER (MB)
Completed                                33/33   1414/1414    17.8/17.8

PHASE                                        ACTIONS
Install Phase                              2446/2446 

PHASE                                          ITEMS
Package State Update Phase                     33/33 
Image State Update Phase                         2/2 
vzpyrus3a (root) #
vzpyrus3a (root) # pkg install pkg:/library/motif pkg:/runtime/java/jre-6
           Packages to install:  3
       Create boot environment: No
Create backup boot environment: No

DOWNLOAD                                  PKGS       FILES    XFER (MB)
Completed                                  3/3     760/760      5.2/5.2

PHASE                                        ACTIONS
Install Phase                                884/884 

PHASE                                          ITEMS
Package State Update Phase                       3/3 
Image State Update Phase                         2/2 

Listing 2. Adding Extra Packages

Perform an Oracle Database "software only" installation into the /u02 directory. For more details about installing the Oracle Database software, see Oracle Database Installation Guide 11g Release 2 (11.2) for Oracle Solaris.

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