I would like to know the feasibility of use of the following and any gotchas, constraints, risks for the same.
In a Oracle clusterware (now called grid infrastructure) cluster nodes (2 nodes cluster) on Linux - configured in Active-Passive mode (Only one node will run a given cluster resource/service at a time) -
Can I use a LUN presented to both the nodes, format it as ext3 filesystem and use in the cluster to mount it to one server only at a time?
[I wont be using cluster LVM - just format the LUN as a single partition as ext3 filesystem and mount on one server. Ensuring that the filesystem is mounted only on one server at any given point in time (through the scripts for defining cluster resource).]
Is this a well used approach?
Is this an acceptable approach?
Are their any issues, risks in this approach?
Thanks.
Probably not nowadays. People who do clustering with Oracle want either high availability, scaling or disaster recovery protection.
HA means Dataguard.
DR means Dataguard.
Scaling means RAC.
An active-standby, in my book, needs to have a complete separate disk to be useful.
We used to run Oracle Failsafe Clusters years ago, but now with the maturity of RAC and DG, they don't really bring that much to the table. From a redundancy perspective, they don't provide much protection, and don't help you scale either, as there is always an idle CPU.
>>Is this an acceptable approach?
Personally, I'd say no. ext3 isn't a cluster filesystem, so if you have shared LUNs, it will corrupt the filesystem if one node doesn't know what the other node is doing. Will it work, yes probably, as long as you can guarantee against simultaenous mounting.
>>Are their any issues, risks in this approach?
See above.
If you really want to do clustering, I'd do a RAC cluster, or a data guard cluster. Active-standby really isn't much use in my experience, because most failures I've seen were historically disk lated.
My question to you is, "Do you want HA, scaling, or DR protection?"