Grid Infrastructure And Database High Availability Deep Dive Seminars 2013

So this is a little bit of a plug for myself and Enkitec but I’m running my Grid Infrastructure And Database High Availability Deep Dive Seminars again for Oracle University. This time these events are online, so no need to come to a classroom at all.

Here is the short description of the course:

Providing a highly available database architecture fit for today’s fast changing requirements can be a complex task. Many technologies are available to provide resilience, each with its own advantages and possible disadvantages. This seminar begins with an overview of available HA technologies (hard and soft partitioning of servers, cold failover clusters, RAC and RAC One Node) and complementary tools and techniques to provide recovery from site failure (Data Guard or storage replication).

In the second part of the seminar, we look at Grid Infrastructure in great detail. Oracle Grid Infrastructure is the latest incarnation of the Clusterware HA framework which successfully powers every single 10g and 11g RAC installation. Despite its widespread implementation, many of its features are still not well understood by its users. We focus on Grid Infrastructure, what it is, what it does and how it can be put to best use, including the creation of an active/passive cold failover cluster for web and database resources.

If you are interested I would like to invite you to head over to the Oracle University website here which has a more extensive synopsis and all the detail you need:

http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getCourseDesc?dc=D81641_2043034

UPDATE: I received several emails and comments that the above link does not work. I couldn’t reproduce this until today. It appears to be an issue with the country selection. If you have USA selected in the top right corner the link won’t work, switching to United Kingdom (my preference) will fetch the course detail. I don’t quite understand as to why that is the case since the class is virtual and not depending on a country…

I hope to hear from you during the course!

OUGN Spring Seminar 2013

The annual conference held by the Oracle User Group in Norway has once again been just great. It was the second year I went and I have to admit that it was every bit as good as last year, and that’s holding a very high standard.

The combination of such great hosts, great speakers and a wonderful atmosphere make this one of the best conferences to attend in Europe. The added benefit of being on a boat makes it a great opportunity to meet the speakers and to hang out with during dinner and after the sessions. Unfortunately I had to leave a day early and write these lines while on a train back home.

OUGN Spring meeting 2012

I had the great pleasure to spend the better part of last week at the Norwegian Oracle User Group’s spring conference. Martin Nash and I helped promote the Real Application Cluster platform on the attendees’ laptop in a program called RAC Attack.  RAC Attack has its home on the wikibooks website http://racattack.org where the whole program is documented and available for self-study. The purpose of the hands-on labs which Jeremy Schneider started a few years ago is to allow users to get practical experience installing Oracle Linux, Grid Infrastructure and the RDBMS binaries before creating a two node database. Following the database creation a practical session ensues which explains certain HA concepts with RAC such as session failover. We are planning on greatly enhancing the lab session as we go along. If you have any suggestions about what you would like to see covered by us then please let us know!

RAC Attack at OUGN 2012

Quick post to bring the Virtual Box PDF to the attendees. Follow this link to get the instructions

RAC Attack Using VirtualBox

UPDATE

This post was the best way to get the PDF instructions to participants of the OUGN 2012 RAC Attack seminar without too much effort on our side. If you have since then used your favourite search engine and ended up here in the hope that there is an interesting story please navigate here instead:

http://martincarstenbach.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/ougn-spring-meeting-2012/

Thanks for passing by!

AIM SIG and my talk about Enterprise Manager 12c

Yesterday I presented at UKOUG’s Availability, Infrastructure and Management Special Interest Group (hey, say this 3 times in a row, quickly!) about Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c and my experience with it. As my good fried Piet de Visser pointed out I had way too much to say for the 45 minute slot allocated. But then Piet always tells me that. Sadly he is also often right :) That’s why I like seeing him during my talks!

In summary I would have liked to do a different presentation, and that’s for two reasons: 1) I overran and 2) I haven’t managed to show the patching part which is hugely interesting, at least to me.

Now here’s the reason for the blog post. I haven’t done online seminars yet, and was wondering if people were interested in a 1-1.5 hour UKOUG-like presentation from myself, broadcast via Goto Meeting or similar to an audience. Would that be of interest? The topics to be covered are:

• Thinking about the installation of OEM 12c including HA and other deployment options
• Walking through the installation using print screens (it takes too long and I would bore you showing a slow moving progress bar)
• Demo time, i.e. logging on to the system and showing a few things

For the interactive part I’d

• show the new user interface
• walk through the agent push
• demonstrate how to add a target
• and finally guide you through the patching process

I prefer this to be interactive (technology permitting), with a timescale of 1 to 1.5 hours and a Q&A session at the end. I will try to set something up if there is sufficient interest.

WARNING & disclaimer

I’m not an expert in OEM 12c! I installed it, played with it and can show you what I know.

Availability Infrastructure & Management SIG March 14th 2012

I am proud to be able to speak at the first instalment of the Availability, infrastructure and management SIG on March 14th in  the London City office.

The event is announced on the UKOUG website here:

http://www.ukoug.org/events/ukoug-availability-infrastructure-and-management-sig-meeting/

Unfortunately I will be between you and lunch! I hope that works out, and I don’t overrun.

I am going to demonstrate my (little) knowledge of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12.1. I looked at it for one of my customers and came to like it. As it is very different from the previous versions of the product, a more closely focused session seems appropriate. An Internet connection permitting, I am going to demonstrate navigation through the new interface, self update, target discovery and if time permits, I will patch a single instance HA environment (also known as Oracle Restart).

If all demos work this could be quite an entertaining sessions, questions are welcome!

oracleracsig.org presentation October 27 2011

For all of those who aren’t tired of listening to me yet there is good news: I am presenting a webinar at http://www.oracleracsig.org on October 27th 2011. I will most likely be around 17:00 UK time as the meetings start 09:00 PST. I agreed with the committee that we have performed a lot of nitty-gritty down to the very low level, and should probably do a more high level overview presentation as well. As it happens, I am starting my seminars with exactly that!

For your convenience the abstract and summary are shown below-hoping to see you online.

An Introduction to Oracle High Availability

This introductory level session aims at providing an overview of Oracle High Availability options to users of traditional single instance Oracle deployments who are interested in ways to make their database more highly available.

Starting with single instance Oracle the discussion begins with addressing single points of failure in a Unix server. Virtualisation can be another step to making server failures transparent to the users. A different approach to virtualisation is the use of active passive clusters. These have been the traditional domain of established vendors such as IBM with Power HA and Veritas with their Veritas Cluster Suite. Interestingly much of their functionality can now be implemented with Oracle Clusterware/Grid Infrastructure as well at no extra cost.

The next step on the high availability ladder is the active/active cluster, for which one finds only very few implementations in the field. Oracle’s Real Application Cluster is probably the most widely spread. RAC can be configured locally on one data centre, or extend to more than one data centre which is probably the pinnacle of RAC deployment. Both of the setups are going to be explored during the presentation.

The discussion ends with a necessary view on disaster recovery strategies, both block-level oriented (EMC SRDF, HP CA etc) as well as Data Guard. Time permitting we will touch on replication technologies as well.

You should soon see the announcement on the oracleracsig.org website as well. As always, the presentation and recording will be made available there. All you need is a free account and a browser to take you to the list of previous webinars.

RAC and HA SIG meting Royal Institute of British Architects September 2011

I have been looking forward to the RAC & HA SIG for quite some time. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make the spring meeting which must have been fantastic. For those who haven’t heard about it, this was the last time the SIG met under its current name-as Dave Burnham, the chair pointed out in his welcome note.

RAC & HA SIG is going to merge with the management & infrastructure SIG to form the availability management and infrastructure SIG, potentially reducing the number of meetings to 3 for the combined SIG. This is hopefully going to increase the number of attendees and also offer a larger range of topics. I am looking forward to the new format and am hoping for a wider number of topics and greater appeal.

Partly down to the transport problems that hit London today (Victoria Line was severely delayed and apparently overground services were impacted as well) the number of attendees was lower than expected.

The following are notes I have taken during the sessions, and as I’m not the best multi-tasking person in the world there may be some grammatical errors and typos in this post for which I apologise in advance.

Oracle RAC SIG presentation tips

Yesterday I proudly presented a one hour training class about upgrading to Oracle 11.2 RAC at oracleracsig.org. This was the first time I presented using this facility and thought it might be useful for others to learn about the procedures and hopefully encourage other speakers to follow suit. It’s really straight forward and there is nothing to worry about! Especially if you are already familiar with webex, presenting should be a piece of cake. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So how do you get to present?

Additional date for my Grid Infrastructure seminar in the UK

I was very pleasently surprised that Oracle University are offering another day for my “Grid Infrastructure and Database High Availability Deep Dive” seminar. In addition to the immenent seminars in June (I blogged about them earlier), this one is in London, England. For anyone interested, here is the link:

http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getCourseDesc?dc=D70365_1439069&p_org_id=28&lang=US

The date has been set to October 10th, so there is plenty of time still, but nevertheless I hope to see you there!