1 Overview and Scope

Oracle Exalogic is an integrated hardware and software system designed to provide a complete platform for a wide range of application types and a wide variety of workloads. Exalogic is intended for large-scale, performance-sensitive, mission-critical application deployments.

This chapter contains the following sections:

1.1 Overview of Backup and Recovery Concepts

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

  • 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 to 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 the backup and recovery solution for the Oracle Exalogic machine, which builds upon well-established solutions for Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware. This document also describes how to leverage the built-in features of the ZFS Storage Appliance for disk-based backups.

1.2 Scope

This document covers backing up and restoring the configuration of the Exalogic infrastructure components, and backing up and restoring the management components (the Exalogic Control Stack) of the cloud infrastructure when the Exalogic machine is deployed in a virtual configuration.

The Exalogic Control Stack consists of the Oracle VM Manager, the Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center and their repositories deployed to an Oracle Database.

The repository containing the disk images—for Exalogic Control vServers and for the application vServers—is located on the local ZFS Storage Appliance of the Exalogic machine.

1.3 Supported Platforms

This document is intended for use with the following platforms:

  • Physical (Linux): Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 2.0.3.x.x and earlier

  • Physical (Solaris): Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 2.0.4.x.x and earlier

  • Virtual (Oracle VM): Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 2.0.4.x.x and earlier

Note:

For all later releases, Oracle recommends using the ExaBR tool to back up and recover Exalogic data. For more information, see the Backup and Recovery Guide Using ExaBR.

1.4 Backup and Recovery Recommendations

This section provides general backup and recovery recommendations for Exalogic.

  • For additional protection, it is strongly recommended that the backups be stored on an external storage appliance or on tape, depending on your current backup practices.

  • It is strongly recommended that regular backups of your data be scheduled. The backup schedule should be based on the nature of your data.

  • Schedule daily backups to the local ZFS storage appliance and weekly backups to the external ZFS Storage appliance.

  • 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.