1
Pre-installation

This chapter describes the pre-installation tasks required for Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard. It contains the following sections:

• Installation Overview

• System Installation Requirements

• Setting the Environment

Installation Overview

To install Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard, perform the following tasks:

1. Check the prerequisites: Ensure that the local system meets the hardware, software, memory, and disk space requirements for Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard.

   See Also: See "System Installation Requirements" for information about requirements.

2. Set up the UNIX environment: Ensure that the UNIX environment is set up correctly for Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard.

   See Also: See "Setting the Environment" for information about setting up the UNIX environment.

3. Set up the Oracle environment: Ensure that a two node Oracle9i Real Application Clusters cluster has been created and configured.

   See Also: See "Setting the Environment" for information on setting up the Oracle environment.

4. Configure Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard: Use the provided Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard setup utility to install Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard.

   See Also: See Chapter 2, "Configuration Tasks" for information about configuring Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard.

5. Perform post-installation tasks: Start Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard and ensure that it is correctly installed and configured.

   See Also: See Chapter 3, "Post-installation Tasks" for information about post-installation tasks.

System Installation Requirements

Verify that the system meets the requirements described in the following sections before installing Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard:

• Operating System Dependent Components

• Oracle Product Requirements

• Network Requirements

Operating System Dependent Components

The Operating System Dependent layer provides the services required for proper operation of Oracle9i Real Application Clusters. Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard also requires these components, but might require different versions from the Oracle9i Real Application Clusters software. Table 1-1 shows the operating system dependent components required for Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard.

Table 1-1 Operating System Software Components

Table 1-2 lists the commands to determine the operating system patches for each platform.

Table 1-2 Commands to Determine Operating System Patches

$ swlist -l product | grep PH 

swlist -l bundle

Oracle Product Requirements

The Oracle products listed in Table 1-3 must be installed and running before you install Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard:

Table 1-3 Oracle Product Requirements for Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard

Network Requirements

The following section describes the network requirements for each platform.

Network Requirements

Two public IP addresses (one for each Real Application Clusters Guard Pack) must be pre-allocated to be used for a primary and secondary network client connection. These IP addresses will be used as logical hosts, and are enabled and disabled on the appropriate host as needed by the Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard Packs. For information on setting up logical IP addresses, refer to the system documentation.

Specify the IP addresses in the Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard setup configuration file using the following parameters:

• PFS_IP_PACK_HOSTA

• PFS_IP_PACK_HOSTB

After you run the PFSSETUP utility, these IP addresses are associated with the LAN interface card. If the Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard pack is moved to another node, these IP addresses are also moved.

Setting the Environment

This section contains the following sections:

• Set-Up Tasks to Perform as the root User

• Set-Up Tasks to Perform as the oracle User

Set-Up Tasks to Perform as the root User

Log in as the root user and configure the system for Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard as described in Table 1-4.

Table 1-4 UNIX Environment  

# <hostname> <username>
hosta oracle
hostb oracle

Set-Up Tasks to Perform as the oracle User

Log in to the oracle account and perform the following tasks, if required:

1. Set environment variables. Table 1-5 lists common environment variables. For Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard, you must set the DB_NAME and ORACLE_SERVICE environment variables.

   Table 1-5 Environment Variables  

   Environment Variable	Requirement	Description
   DB_NAME	Required	Specifies the value of the initialization parameter DB_NAME entered during the Oracle installation process or during database creation.
   ORACLE_BASE	Optional	Specifies the directory at the top of the Oracle software and administrative file structure. Not required, but recommended as part of an OFA-compliant installation.
   ORACLE_HOME	Required	Specifies the directory containing the Oracle software for a particular release. Ensure that the ORACLE_HOME environment variable points to a directory that does not already contain any Oracle software.
   ORACLE_SID	Required	Specifies the Oracle system identifier, or SID, which is the same as the Oracle Server instance. Because the SID is incorporated into many filenames, Oracle Corporation recommends restricting it to no more than four characters, to avoid filename problems on different systems. The SID for each instance in a Real Application Cluster should be unique and should incorporate the name of the database it uses.
   ORACLE_SERVICE	Required	Specifies the unique identifier for the Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard environment. This value is used to identify each Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard database environment. It has a four character limitation. You can set this variable to the same values as DB_NAME. Use the ORACLE_SERVICE environment variable to distinguish between Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard environments.
   ORA_NLS33	Optional	Required if you are creating a database with a storage character set other than US7ASCII. Set this environment variable to $ORACLE_HOME/ocommon/nls/admin/data.
   NLS_LANG	Optional	Required if creating a database that uses a character set other than US7ASCII.
   PATH	Required	Include the directory that contains the C compiler executable.

   See Also: For more information on environment variables, refer to the Oracle9i Administrator's Reference.

2. Check the user equivalence settings by performing a remote login to each node in the cluster, including the current node, using rlogin. If you are prompted for a password, the oracle account is not set up correctly on one of the nodes. The oracle account must have the same attributes on each node of the cluster.

3. Make sure that you have a two node Oracle9i Real Application Clusters database running and tuned with the Oracle products as listed in Table 1-3. The alert log contains entries showing whether the Oracle9i Real Application Clusters software is running.