5.2 Migrating a Bare Metal Oracle RAC Cluster to an Oracle RAC Cluster in Oracle VM

Note:

This topic applies only to two-socket x86 servers. It does not apply to eight-socket servers such as Oracle Exadata Database Machine X5-8.

The migration of a bare metal Oracle RAC cluster to an Oracle RAC cluster in Oracle VM can be achieved in the following ways:

• Migrate to Oracle RAC cluster in Oracle VM using the existing bare metal Oracle RAC cluster with zero downtime.

• Migrate to Oracle RAC cluster in Oracle VM by creating a new Oracle RAC cluster in Oracle VM with minimal downtime.

• Migrate to Oracle RAC cluster in Oracle VM using Oracle Data Guard with minimal downtime.

• Migrate to Oracle RAC cluster in Oracle VM using Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) backup and restore with complete downtime.

The conversion of a bare metal Oracle RAC cluster to an Oracle RAC cluster in Oracle VM has the following implications:

• Each of the database servers will be converted to an Oracle VM Server on which a management domain (dom0) is created along with one or more user domains, depending on the number of Oracle RAC clusters being deployed. Each user domain on a database server will belong to a particular Oracle RAC cluster.

• As part of the conversion procedure, the bare metal Oracle RAC cluster will be converted to one Oracle RAC cluster in Oracle VM to start with. There will be one user domain per database server.

• At the end of the conversion, the cell disk and grid disk configuration of the storage cells are the same as they were at the beginning of the conversion.

• The management domain will use a small portion of the system resources on each database server. Typically a management domain uses 8 GB of memory and 4 virtual CPUs. This has to be taken into consideration while sizing the SGA of the databases running on the Oracle RAC cluster in Oracle VM.

• Refer to My Oracle Support note 2099488.1 for the complete instructions.