Migrating Services That Use Oracle Data Guard With a Switchover

You perform a switchover of an Oracle Data Guard protection group when you want to migrate services to the partner cluster in an orderly fashion. A switchover includes the following operations:

• Application services are unmanaged on the former primary cluster cluster-paris.

  For a reminder of which cluster is cluster-paris, see Example Geographic Edition Cluster Configuration in Oracle Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition System Administration Guide.

• The data replication role is reversed and now continues to run from the new primary, cluster-newyork, to the former primary, cluster-paris.

• For HA for Oracle configurations, the dataguard_role resource property is updated to reflect the new status of the new primary and standby clusters.

• Application services and the shadow Oracle database-server resource groups are brought online on the new primary cluster cluster-newyork.

This section provides the following information:

• How to Switch Over an Oracle Data Guard Protection Group From the Primary to the Standby Cluster

• Actions Performed by the Geographic Edition Software During a Switchover

How to Switch Over an Oracle Data Guard Protection Group From the Primary to the Standby Cluster

Before You Begin

For a switchover to occur, data replication must be active between the primary cluster and the standby cluster, that is, the Oracle Data Guard Broker configuration is enabled. Additionally, the Oracle Data Guard Broker show configuration command must show a SUCCESS state. This state is reflected in the state of the Geographic Edition replication resource for this Oracle Data Guard Broker configuration, which should show the online state.

Before you switch over a protection group from the primary cluster to the standby cluster, ensure that the following conditions are met:

• Geographic Edition software is running on the both clusters.

• The standby cluster is a member of a partnership.

• Both cluster partners can be reached.

• The overall state of the protection group is set to OK.

1. Become superuser or assume a role that is assigned the Geo Management RBAC rights profile.

   For more information about RBAC, see Geographic Edition Software and RBAC in Oracle Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition System Administration Guide.

   ---

   Note - If you use a role with Geo Management RBAC rights, ensure that the /var/cluster/geo ACLs are correct on each node of both partner clusters. If necessary, become superuser on the cluster node and set the correct ACLs.

   # chmod A+user:username:rwx:allow /var/cluster/geo

   The /var/cluster/geo directory must have the correct access control lists (ACL) applied for compatibility between the Geo Management RBAC rights profile and Oracle Data Guard.

   ---

2. Initiate the switchover.

   The application resource groups that are a part of the protection group are stopped and started during the switchover.

   phys-node-n# geopg switchover [-f] -m newprimarycluster protectiongroupname

   -f

   Forces the command to perform the operation without asking you for confirmation.

   -m newprimarycluster

   Specifies the name of the cluster that is to be the primary cluster for the protection group.

   protectiongroupname

   Specifies the name of the protection group.

Example 3-1 Forcing a Switchover From the Primary to the Standby Cluster

This example shows how to perform a switchover to the standby cluster.

phys-paris-1# geopg switchover -f -m cluster-newyork sales-pg

Actions Performed by the Geographic Edition Software During a Switchover

When you run the geopg switchover command, the software confirms that the primary cluster does indeed hold the primary database. The command checks that the remote database is in an enabled state in the Oracle Data Guard Broker configuration. The command also confirms that the configuration is healthy by issuing the Oracle Data Guard command-line interface (dgmgrl) show configuration command to ensure that the command returns a SUCCESS state. If the output from this command indicates that Oracle Data Guard Broker is busy performing its own health check, the Oracle Data Guard command-line interface retries the command until it receives a SUCCESS response or until two minutes have passed. If the command-line interface is unable to get a SUCCESS response, the command fails. If the configuration is healthy, the software performs the following actions on the original primary cluster:

• Takes offline the application resource groups in the protection group and places them in the Unmanaged state

• Performs a switchover to standby-database-name command for each Oracle Data Guard Broker configuration in the protection group

On the original standby cluster, the command takes the following actions:

• Runs the script that is defined in the RoleChange_ActionCmd property

• Brings online all the shadow Oracle database-server resource groups and any other application resource groups in the protection group

If the command completes successfully, the standby cluster, cluster-newyork, becomes the new primary cluster for the protection group. The original primary cluster, cluster-paris, becomes the new standby cluster. Databases that are associated with the Oracle Data Guard Broker configurations of the protection group have their role reversed according to the role of the protection group on the local cluster. For HA for Oracle configurations, the dataguard_role resource property is also updated with the status of the new primary and standby clusters. The shadow Oracle database-server resource group and any other application resource groups in the protection group are online on the new primary cluster. Data replication from the new primary cluster to the new standby cluster begins.

This command returns an error if any of the previous operations fails. Run the geoadm status command to view the status of each component. For example, the Configuration status of the protection group might be set to Error, depending on the cause of the failure. The protection group might be activated or deactivated.

If the Configuration status of the protection group is set to Error, revalidate the protection group by using the procedures that are described in How to Validate an Oracle Data Guard Protection Group.

If the configuration of the protection group is not the same on each partner cluster, you need to resynchronize the configuration by using the procedures that are described in How to Resynchronize an Oracle Data Guard Protection Group.