This chapter provides describes the benefits of using Oracle Site Guard as a disaster-recovery solution, and the new features in this an previous releases.
This chapter includes the following sections:
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.
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.
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.
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.
The following sections list the main features introduced in this and previous Oracle Site Guard releases:
The following new features are available with Oracle Site Guard release 13.1.1.0:
Convert your Standby site to a fully functional site in order to validate and test the site in preparation for a disaster recovery event. Increase your confidence in your disaster recovery plans and procedures.
Create execution groups to customize the sequence in which you want to handle targets in your operation plan. Execution groups contain targets which are handled in parallel within the group. Use this feature to orchestrate the parallel and serial aspects of your disaster recovery plan.
Customize Step-level Timeouts for Operation Plans
Customize the timeout for each step in an operation plan based on the needs of your DR environment.
Database Disaster Recovery Enhancements
Enable diagnostic tracing at the Data Guard level for database switchover and failover
Configure immediate failover of databases at the Data Guard level
Ignore warnings and force a database failover
Support for Multi-Tenant Databases
Protect multi-tenant databases in your enterprise.
ZFS Disaster Recovery Enhancements
Configure ZFS disaster recovery to use ZFS public or singleton interfaces instead of private interfaces. Leverage ZFS clustering to provide a more resilient disaster recovery plan.
Detect and Analyze ZFS Replication Lags
Analyze ZFS Replication Lags. Use bundled scripts to analyze lags in ZFS replication configurations before and during execution of disaster recovery plans.
Assign Tags to Operation Plans
Assign one or more tags to operation plans and use combinations of these tags to filter and display your operation plans. Use this feature to search, organize, and catalog, your operation plans.
Customize Database and Storage Disaster Recovery Stages
Customize Site Guard operation plans to perform Database or Storage Disaster Recovery actions at any stage of your plan.
Support for NetApp MetroCluster Storage Deployments
For details, see MOS note in Oracle Site Guard Feature For NetApp MetroCluster (Doc ID 1964220) at https://support.oracle.com.
The following new features are available with Oracle Site Guard release 12.1.0.7.0:
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.
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.
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 with Oracle Site Guard.
Support for Oracle Database 12c
Protect your Oracle Database 12c deployment with Oracle Site Guard.