Setting up Oracle Disaster Recovery using Purity ActiveDR

Oracle

Audience
Public
Technology Integrations
Oracle
Source Type
Documentation

Purity ActiveDR™, available with Purity //FA6.0+, delivers continuous, near real-time, replication between two FlashArrays™ within or across disparate data centers thus enabling data protection solutions with near-zero RPO (Recovery Time Objective) and a very short RTO (Recovery Time Objective). This results in global data protection with minimal data loss and fast failover to the Disaster Recovery (DR) site.

In this article, we will learn how to set up Oracle disaster recovery (DR) between two sites using Purity ActiveDR™.

The unit of replication, failover, and consistency with ActiveDR is a pod. Think of a pod as a logical container. Each pod is a separate namespace and can contain a mix of volumes, protection groups with member volumes, and volume snapshot history. A pod, when created, is in the promoted state, meaning it’s available to the host with read/write access. A demoted pod allows only read-only access to the host. A remote pod must be in a demoted state when a replica link is created. Local and remote pods/FlashArrays are also interchangeably referred to as the source and target pods/FlashArrays.

Here are the high-level steps that need to be performed to set up DR for an Oracle database:

  1. Create a PROD pod
  2. Create a protection group within the PROD pod
  3. Move volumes out of the current protection group, if applicable
  4. Move volumes into the PROD pod
  5. Add volumes into the protection group in PROD pod
  6. Create DR (remote) Pod
  7. Create Replica Link between the two pods

    If you are new to ActiveDR, you'll find ActiveDR Solution Overview White Paper quite useful.

    If you are running your Oracle databases in a VMware environment, please refer to Guidelines for in Environments for additional guidance.

    Environment setup

    Our environment consists of a production database oraprd12 that is running on a physical Linux host sn1-r720-e03-03 connected to FlashArray sn1-x70r2-e03-27. This database uses ASM has 6 volumes that are in the protection group oraprd12-pg. We'll refer to this database as the PROD database and the FlashArray as the PROD or local FlashArray.

    We will be setting up a DR site to replicate the production database using ActiveDR. At the DR site, the database is running on physical host sn1-r720-e03-05 connected to FlashArray sn1-x70r2-e03-30. We will perform each step from the Purity GUI, as well as from the CLI. We'll refer to this database as the DR database and the FlashArray as DR or remote FlashArray.

     

    Local Site (PROD)

    Remote Site (DR)

    Host Name

    sn1-r720-e03-03

    sn1-r720-e03-05

    FlashArray

    sn1-x70r2-e03-27

    sn1-x70r2-e03-30

    Pod Name

    oraprd12-pod

    oraprd12-pod-dr

    Protection Group Name

    oraprd12-pg

    oraprd12-pg-dr