Is This Your Idea of Disaster Recovery?

Posted by rickramsey on Oracle Blogs See other posts from Oracle Blogs or by rickramsey
Published on Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:58:30 +0000 Indexed on 2012/10/29 23:11 UTC
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Don't just make do with less.

Protect what you've got.

By, for instance, deploying Oracle Solaris 10 inside a zone cluster.

"Wait," you say, "what is a zone cluster?"

It is a zone deployed across different physical servers.

"Who would do that!" you ask in a mild panic.

Why, an upstanding sysadmin citizen interested in protecting his or her employer's investment with appropriate high availability and disaster recovery. If one server gets wiped out by Hurricane Sandy along with pretty much the entire East Coast of the USA, your zone continues to run on the other server(s). Provided you set them up in Edinburgh. This white paper (pdf) explains what a zone cluster is and how to use it. If a white paper reminds you of having to read War and Peace in school, just use this Oracle RAC and Solaris Cluster Cheat Sheet, instead.

"But wait!" you exclaim. "I didn't realize Solaris 10 offered zone clusters!"

I didn't, either! And in an earlier version of this blog post I said that zone clusters were only available with Oracle Solaris 11. But Karoly Vegh pointed me to the documentation for Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3, which explains how to manage zone clusters in Oracle Solaris 10. Bite my fist!

So, the point I was trying to make is not just that you can run Oracle Solaris 10 zone clusters, but that you can run them in an Oracle Solaris 11 environment. Now let's return to our conversation and pick up where we left off ...

"Oh no! Whatever shall I do?"

Fear not. Remember how Oracle Solaris 11 lets you create a Solaris 10 branded zone inside a system running Oracle Solaris 11? Well, the Solaris Cluster engineers thought that was a bang-up idea, and decided to extend Oracle Solaris Cluster so that you could run your Solaris 10 applications inside the protective cocoon of an Oracle Solaris 11 zone cluster. Take advantage of the installation improvements and network virtualization capabilities of Oracle Solaris 11 while still running your application on Oracle Solaris 10. You Luddite, you.

That capability is in the latest release of Oracle Solaris Cluster, version 4.1, which became available last Friday.

"Last Friday! Is it too late to get a copy?"

You can still get a free copy from our download center (see below). And, if you'd like to know what other goodies the 4.1 release of Oracle Solaris Cluster provides, see:

As always, you can get the latest information about Oracle Solaris Cluster, plus technical how-to articles, documentation, and more from Oracle Solaris Cluster Resource Page for Sysadmins and Developers.

And don't forget about the online launch of Oracle Solaris 11.1 and Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1, scheduled for Nov 7.