Advanced RAC Features in Oracle Database 10g Release 2

The major focus for Oracle 10g Release 2 RAC is to increase the availability and support for Cluster Ready Services (renamed Oracle Clusterware) and to improve the availability, integrity, and performance for the overall 10g RAC environment. Following is a brief summary of what's with Oracle 10g Release 2 RAC support:

• Starting with Oracle Database 10g Release 2, Cluster Ready Services has been improved and renamed Oracle Clusterware. Oracle Clusterware can be implemented independently of Oracle RAC.

• Oracle Clusterware provides automatic clusterware file redundancy by maintaining two copies of the Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR) and three or more copies of the voting disk files. This extends the availability of Oracle Clusterware and eliminates the 10g Release 1 single point of failure and the need for third-party redundancy support.

• Oracle Clusterware provides an open API to extend support for third-party components running on the server.

• Oracle 10g Release 2 provides a new validation tool named Cluster Verification Utility (CVU) to ensure that all necessary components are correctly installed and configured during the initial deployment of a new RAC environment. CVU divides its deployment checks into the following stages: hardware and O/S setup, Cluster File System setup, Oracle Clusterware setup, RDBMS installation and configuration, node setup and addition, storage addition, and network modification.

• Oracle 10g Release 2 extends the support for connection load balancing by offering a new RAC load balancing advisory. This new advisory monitors the RAC workload activity across all instances in the cluster as well as analyzes the service level for each instance based on service time or throughput.

• Oracle 10g Release 2 provides new tracing and diagnostic services for the RAC environment. This support improves the diagnostics of cluster wait/hang conditions as well as provides more effective logging of Oracle Clusterware error and alert messages.

• Oracle 10g Release 2 supports clusters of up to 100 nodes on all certified platforms. In 10g Release 1, Oracle supported clusters of up to only 64 nodes.

• Oracle 10g Release 2 allows dynamic RMAN channel allocation for RAC environments.