About Configuring a Standby Database for Oracle Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer

In the event of a disaster, your Oracle Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer primary database could become unavailable. A standby database is a copy of the production database that becomes available in the event of a production database outage. This playbook describes how to configure a standby database for Oracle Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer using the OCI interface.

Oracle Data Guard ensures high availability, data protection, and disaster recovery for enterprise data in an Oracle Database. Oracle Data Guard provides a comprehensive set of services that create, maintain, manage, and monitor one or more standby databases to enable production Oracle databases to survive disasters and data corruptions.

Oracle Data Guard maintains these standby databases as copies of the production database. If the production database becomes unavailable because of a planned or an unplanned outage, Oracle Data Guard can switch any standby database to production, minimizing the downtime associated with the outage.

Architecture

This architecture shows an Oracle Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer primary database that transmits data to a standby database using Oracle Data Guard. The standby database is remotely located from the primary database for disaster recovery.

Description of the illustration exadata-database-cloud-customer-standby-database.png

Before You Begin

Before you begin, ensure you are familiar with the following resources:

• "Use Oracle Data Guard with Oracle Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer" in Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer Administrator's Guide.
• Enabling Data Guard on Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer Video.
• "Create Oracle Database Homes on an Oracle Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer System"" in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation

This playbook is tested on the following software and hardware versions of Oracle Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer:

• Oracle Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer X8M-2
• Exaimage 23.1.23
• Oracle Database 19.25

Considerations for Configuration

Before you begin to configure your standby database, review these assumptions and considerations.

• The primary and standby Oracle Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer infrastructures must be managed in the same OCI tenancy, but they can be managed in different OCI regions to ensure high availability in the event of a disaster.
• The standby database is a physical standby.
• The primary and standby databases can be in different compartments.
• A primary database supports up to a maximum of six standby databases using the new Data Guard Group model (19c and later). If you have an existing standby database using the Data Guard Association model, you can change your configuration to a Data Guard Group. This model switch only changes the OCI tooling metadata, and does not affect the databases. See Change an Oracle Data Guard Association to an Oracle Data Guard Group section to learn more.
• To ensure maximum fault isolation for production workloads, we recommend primary and standby databases are configured on different Exadata Infrastructures. The Data Guard Group model allows in-region and cross-region standbys. Configuring cascade standby databases is not supported.
• The primary and standby databases can run different release updates of the same major database version, particularly when performing maintenance and update operations. Standby databases can run newer release updates than primary databases.
• Oracle Database Home Software, DBaaS Tools, and Dbcs Agent versions must be identical between primary and standby VM Clusters.
• Your Oracle Data Guard configuration can be Active Data Guard or Data Guard. Whether you use Active Data Guard or Data Guard for the standby databases, automatic backups can now be enabled for any type of standby database.
• You can configure Data Guard for databases using customer managed keys (Oracle Key Vault). If a database will be configured with Data Guard and customer managed keys, first migrate the Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) keys to customer managed keys, then configure Data Guard.
• Intermediate storage is not required. Standby database instantiation will happen over the network.

About Required Services and Roles

This solution requires the following service:

• Oracle Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer

These are the roles needed for each service.

Service Name: Role	Required to...
Oracle Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer: sys	Create the standby database in Oracle Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer. Log in to primary database and create Data Guard association between the primary and standby databases.

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