11.4 Preparation phase

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The first step during the preparation phase is to decide on the hardware and software requirements and the administrative issues related to each of these environments. Most of the discussions on the various hardware technologies, including storage and disk configuration, have been covered in detail in Chapter 2 (Hardware Concepts). From these discussions, an appropriate environment should be prepared, based on the requirements of the business and the cost-benefit analysis determined in the previous section. An appropriate clustered hardware solution and license for implementing RAC in a production environment should be purchased.

While deciding on the hardware, a fair question to ask is, what should the actual configuration be? While such a question does arise several times throughout the process, the actual configuration is determined and obtained through the capacity planning process.

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