Werner Puschitz talked yesterday about Automated Oracle Real Application Clusters Deployment: How Dell Does IT.
The result of the automation is, install a 6 nodes cluster in 30 minutes. Which is quite impressive.
Werner divided the automation in three RPM packages.
1) configure the host: set up private and virtual interface (according to a naming convention, for example private is hostname-priv, vip is hostname-vip). Set up the system configuration (shared memory, etc). Set up the SAN, shared devices. Set up ssh. Define a cronjob to check if all nodes are configured and accessible. Write an email to the sysadmin when all nodes are ready
2) install the clusterware. the RPM is build with a response file + the oracle software. The response file is recorded with ./runInstaller -record.
3) install the database software. the RPM is build with a response file too
Werner said it is rather worth to build those packages for large companies, where you have many RAC installations. In my opinion, even if you have only one or two rac, you can benefit from this. It provides you an easy way to reinstall the system, upgrade it to a new version, create two systems (dev+prod) with the same configuration.
Thanks Werner for this very good one!
This is a good post about a good methodology. An alternative approach is with CFS since shared Oracle Home is fully supported.
I keep a ton of information about such things here:
http://kevinclosson.wordpress.com/written-works-and-presentations/
yes, werner talked about this too. He also mentioned a solution with two shared homes, to facilitate rolling upgrade
I’m patalogicaly scared of anything shared. It’s enough to share a database in RAC so sharing something else is more and more risk. 😉