1 Introduction to Oracle Site Guard

This chapter provides a brief introduction to Oracle Site Guard. It also describes the benefits of using Oracle Site Guard as a disaster-recovery solution.

It contains the following topics:

1.1 What is Oracle Site Guard

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

1.2 Benefits of 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.

1.3 What is New in This Release

The following new features are available in this release:

Customize Prechecks

Enhance the Prechecks and Health Checks performed by Oracle Site Guard by adding your own Custom Precheck scripts. Use this feature to customize and improve the Prechecks and Health Checks that precede any operation plan.

Add User Scripts to Oracle Enterprise Manager's Software Library

Add your own scripts to Oracle Enterprise Manager's software library and use them in Oracle Site Guard work flows. This leverages the ability of Oracle Site Guard to automatically deploy the scripts at runtime, thereby eliminating the need to manually pre-deploy your scripts on the hosts where they need to run.

Configure Custom Credentials for Script Execution

Configure an alternate set of credentials for executing any configured script. This allows you to execute scripts using credentials that are different than the credentials configured for the script host.

Provide Credentials as Parameters to Scripts

Provide one or more credentials as parameters for configured scripts. This allows you to securely pass credentials to any configured script when the script needs to perform additional authentication functions.

Stop the Primary Site during a Failover Operation

Configure Oracle Site Guard to optionally stop the primary site during a failover operation. Oracle Site Guard attempts to stop the primary site components on best effort basis before failing over to the standby site.

Clone Operation Plans

Using the Create Like feature, create a new operation plan by cloning existing plans. This saves time during configuration, especially when the new operation plan is very similar to an existing plan or script.

Clone Configured Scripts

Using the Create Like feature, configure a new script by cloning an existing script configuration. This saves time during configuration, especially when the new script configuration is very similar to an existing script configuration.

Support for Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c

Protect your Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c deployment using Oracle Site Guard.

Support for Oracle Database 12c

Protect your Oracle Database 12c deployment using Oracle Site Guard.