Introduction to Oracle Site Guard

What is Oracle Site Guard

Oracle Site Guard is a disaster recovery solution that enables administrators to automate complete site switchover and failover.

Oracle Site Guard orchestrates the coordinated failover of Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Fusion Applications, and Oracle Databases. It is also extensible to include other data center software components.

Oracle Site Guard integrates with underlying replication mechanisms that synchronize primary and standby environments and protect mission critical data. It comes with a built-in support for Oracle Data Guard for Oracle database, and Oracle Sun ZFS. Oracle Site Guard can also support other storage replication technologies.

Benefits of Oracle Site Guard

In this section, you learn about the benefits of the Oracle Site Guard.

Oracle Site Guard offers the following benefits:

Minimizes disaster recovery time

Oracle Site Guard operates at the site level, and therefore eliminates the need to tediously perform manual disaster recovery for individual site components like applications, middleware, databases, and so on. The traffic of an entire production site can be redirected to a standby site in a single operation.
Reduces human errors

Disaster recovery involves a complicated orchestration of many precise, interdependent procedures. Oracle Site Guard automates and sequences these procedures to provide fast and seamless disaster recovery operations across sites without any human interaction.
Flexible and customizable

Oracle Site Guard can be adapted for use in any enterprise deployment by customizing and tuning disaster recovery plans. Oracle Site Guard provides mechanisms for customizing operations and handling errors.
Eliminates the need for special skills

Oracle Site Guard operators and administrators do not require any special skills or domain expertise in areas like databases, applications, and storage replication. Oracle Site Guard can continuously monitor disaster recovery readiness and it can do this without disrupting the production site.

What's New in this Guide

In this section, you learn about Oracle Guard Site features introduced in this and previous releases.

The following sections describe the main features introduced in 13.3.1.0.0 and previous Oracle Site Guard releases:

What's New in Release 13.3.1.0.0

The following new features are available with Oracle Site Guard release 13.3.1.0.0:

Database Disaster Recovery Enhancements

Option to configure Database Failover to ignore non-fatal Data Guard warnings
Create Site Properties

Create user-defined name/value pairs to associate with one or more Site Guard sites. Site Properties provide a method to filter out and identify a subset of Site Guard sites. Site Properties is an EMCLI-only feature
ZFS Disaster Recovery Enhancements

It is no longer required to specify a ZFS lag value during Site Guard configuration storage script creation.

What’s New in Release 13.2.2.0.0

The following new features are available with Oracle Site Guard release 13.2.2.0.0:

Oracle Virtual Machine CLI (OVMCLI) DR Script (siteguard_ovmcli_control.py) for performing disaster recovery for OVM 3.2 environments, such as Oracle Private Cloud Appliance (PCA).
Site Guard ZFS utility script (sg_zfs_utility.sh) for cleaning up and reconfiguring ZFS replication in a multi-site DR configuration.
Get Site Guard Health Check reports using the new EMCLI command “get_siteguard_health_check_report”.
Filter health check notifications so that you are only notified when problems occur.

What’s New in Release 13.2.0.1.0

The following new features are available with Oracle Site Guard release 13.2.0.1.0:

Oracle Virtual Machine (OVM) DR Script – siteguard_ovm_control.py
WebLogic Server Control Script – wls_control_wrapper.pl

What's New in Release 13.1.1.0.0

The following new features are available with Oracle Site Guard release 13.1.1.0:

Standby Site Validation

Convert your Standby site to a fully functional site in order to validate and test the site in preparation for a disaster recovery event. Increase your confidence in your disaster recovery plans and procedures.
Create Execution Groups

Create execution groups to customize the sequence in which you want to handle targets in your operation plan. Execution groups contain targets which are handled in parallel within the group. Use this feature to orchestrate the parallel and serial aspects of your disaster recovery plan.
Customize Step-level Timeouts for Operation Plans

Customize the timeout for each step in an operation plan based on the needs of your DR environment.
Database Disaster Recovery Enhancements
- Enable diagnostic tracing at the Data Guard level for database switchover and failover.
- Configure immediate failover of databases at the Data Guard level.
- Ignore warnings and force a database failover.
Support for Multi-Tenant Databases

Protect multi-tenant databases in your enterprise.
ZFS Disaster Recovery Enhancements

Configure ZFS disaster recovery to use ZFS public or singleton interfaces instead of private interfaces. Leverage ZFS clustering to provide a more resilient disaster recovery plan.
Detect and Analyze ZFS Replication Lags

Use bundled scripts to analyze lags in ZFS replication configurations before and during execution of disaster recovery plans.
Assign Tags to Operation Plans

Assign one or more tags to operation plans and use combinations of these tags to filter and display your operation plans. Use this feature to search, organize, and catalog, your operation plans.
Invoke Database and Storage Disaster Recovery Scripts During Any Phase of Operation

Customize your operation plan by invoking database and storage disaster recovery scripts during the Pre or Post phases of your plan.
Support for NetApp MetroCluster Storage Deployments

For details, see MOS note in Oracle Site Guard Feature For NetApp MetroCluster (Doc ID 1964220) at https://support.oracle.com.