Planning the Geographic Edition Environment

This section provides guidelines for planning and preparing the following components for Geographic Edition software installation:

• Licensing

• Logical Hostnames

• Zone Clusters

Licensing

Ensure that you have available all necessary license certificates before you begin software installation. Geographic Edition software does not require a license certificate. However, each node that is installed with Geographic Edition software must be covered under your Geographic Edition software license agreement.

For licensing requirements for data replication software and application software, see the installation documentation for those products.

Logical Hostnames

Geographic Edition software uses the logical hostname of a cluster for inter-cluster management communication and heartbeat communication. The IP address for a cluster name must be available for Geographic Edition software to wrap a logical hostname around the IP address when the software is started by using the geoadm start command.

You can use the cluster command to find the name of the cluster when you need to verify that the cluster name is suitable for use as a hostname. To find the name of the cluster, run the following command:

# cluster list

For more information, see the cluster(1CL) man page.

Zone Clusters

In some Geographic Edition configurations, a zone cluster can be configured as a cluster partner. Observe the following guidelines for the use of zone clusters in a cluster partnership.

• Zone clusters can be cluster partners in a Geographic Edition configuration that meets either of the following conditions:

  • Application-based data replication is used. Geographic Edition supports Oracle Data Guard, MySQL, and Geographic Edition script-based plug-ins application-based data replication.

  • No data replication is used.

• The partnership can use other zone clusters or a combination of zone clusters and global clusters.

• Geographic Edition framework packages are required in the global zones in all cases, even if Geographic Edition is only going to be enabled in the zone clusters. The Geographic Edition framework package is ha-cluster/geo/geo-framework.

• If storage-based replication is used, all members of a cluster partnership must be global clusters. Zone clusters can exist in a global-cluster partnership that uses storage-based replication, but the zone clusters themselves cannot be members of a partnership that uses storage-based replication.

• You can start the Geographic Edition infrastructure from within a zone cluster node, but not from within any other type of non-global zone.