ExaBR is an Exalogic tool that allows you to automate the backup process for the Oracle Exalogic system configuration and data.
This chapter contains the following sections:
Every Exalogic system includes some redundant components, to ensure that the failure of a single component does not affect the overall availability of the system. However, redundancy within a system does not provide sufficient protection in the following situations:
Full Exalogic system failure due to site outage and disaster
Incorrect data or configuration due to user error while making updates
Data corruption
Disaster recovery (DR) technologies can be useful in some circumstances. For example, one way to safeguard against a full site outage would be to replicate an Exalogic system at another physical location. The replicated system would need to be kept up-to-date with changes made on the primary system. Such a system can provide hot-standby capability in the event of a failure of the primary system.
While hot-standby systems are extremely useful for ensuring business continuity, they are expensive to maintain and often require additional infrastructure. Further, they do not provide a convenient and optimal solution in situations where only certain segments of data need to be restored. For instance, if user error or data corruption leads errors in certain files, these errors would also reflect on the hot-standby system. In such situations, a previous version of the files can be recovered by using a backup and restore functionality.
This document describes using the ExaBR tool to back up the Exalogic system to the storage appliance.
You can use ExaBR to automate the process of backup and recovery of Exalogic data.
You can use ExaBR to back up and recover the following components:
Compute nodes
InfiniBand switches
Ethernet management switches
Storage appliance heads
Exalogic Control stack
User vServers
For information about the supported platforms, see the My Oracle Support document ID 1912063.1.
Note:
Before running ExaBR for an Exalogic rack that was upgraded to EECS 2.0.6.0.0, you must first synchronize the ECU configuration files with the current configuration of the machine, by running an ECU converter. The ECU converter is a tool that is included with ExaPatch. For more information about the ECU converter, see the ExaPatch User's Guide.For information about known issues for ExaBR, see the My Oracle Support document ID 1912063.1.
This document covers using the ExaBR tool to back up and restore the configuration of the Exalogic infrastructure components, and backing up and restoring the management components (the Exalogic Control Stack) of the cloud infrastructure and user vServers when the Exalogic rack is deployed in a virtual configuration.
The Exalogic Control Stack in the Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 2.0.6 release consists of Oracle VM Manager, Oracle Exalogic Control and their repositories deployed to an Oracle Database.
This section provides general backup and recovery recommendations for Exalogic.
It is strongly recommended that regular backups of your data be scheduled. The backup schedule should be based on the nature of your data.
These backups should also be copied to an external ZFS Storage appliance or tape on a schedule, based on the nature of your data.
It is recommended that a gold copy be created for the operating system of the compute nodes in your environment.
It is recommended that the components of the Exalogic Control stack and their repositories be backed up after lifecycle operations, such as adding and removing accounts, users, and vServers.
For more information, see the Exalogic Backup and Recovery Best Practices White Paper at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/features/availability/maa-exalogic-br-1529241.pdf