10gR2 RAC Installation Guide

Here is something interesting. The HP-UX Itanium platform doesn't have it's own configuration guide in the Oracle documentation. You have to use the Oracle Clusterware and Oracle Real Application Clusters Installation and Configuration Guide for hp HP-UX PA-RISC (64-Bit). However, the Itanium platform instructions are included in the document also.

Here is my advice. Before beginning the install of RAC read all of the Installation Guides specific to the release and OS that you will using. Don't just rely on the one installation guide. Read the Release Notes also. And read the Oracle Database Oracle Clusterware and Oracle Real Application Clusters Administration and Deployment Guide. Check for documentation updates.

I plan on following the installation guide step by step. Will create other posts for the sections of the install that are different for HP-UX Itanium or are not clear in the Installation Guide.

Here are some notes that I gathered from the RAC Installation Guides which I felt were noteworthy:

• You must install Oracle Clusterware and Oracle Database in separate home directories. If you will use multiple Oracle Database homes with ASM, then you should install a separate Oracle Database home for ASM. You should create the listener in the Oracle Database Oracle home.
• With Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2) with RAC, CSS has been modified to allow you to configure CSS with multiple voting disks. In 10g Release 1 (10.1), you could configure only one voting disk. By enabling multiple voting disk configuration, the redundant voting disks allow you to configure a RAC database with multiple voting disks on independent shared physical disks. If you intend to use multiple voting disks managed by Oracle Clusterware, then you must have at least three disks to provide sufficient redundancy, and you must ensure that each voting disk is located on physically independent storage.
• For OCR: Configure one disk if you have existing redundancy support. If you intend to use OCR mirroring managed by Oracle Clusterware, then you must have two OCR locations, and you must ensure that each OCR is located on physically independent storage.
• Although you can specify a logical volume as a device in an ASM disk group, Oracle does not recommend their use. Because logical volume managers can hide the physical disk architecture, ASM may not operate effectively when logical volumes are specified as disk group devices. (Got to find out about this one because we are going to use logical volumes with ASM)
• Cluster Verification Utility (CVU) is a tool that performs system checks. CVU is used to assist you with confirming that your system is properly configured for Oracle Clusterware and Oracle Real Application Clusters installation. CVU does not check kernel parameter settings. This issue is tracked with Oracle bug 4565046.

Oracle recommends that you use the following Oracle Database 10g features to simplify RAC database management:

• Oracle Enterprise Manager—Use Enterprise Manager to administer your entire processing environment, not just the RAC database. Enterprise Manager lets you manage a RAC database with its instance targets, listener targets, host targets, and a cluster target, as well as ASM targets if you are using ASM storage for your database.
• Automatic undo management—This feature automatically manages undo processing.
• Automatic segment-space management—This feature automatically manages segment freelists and freelist groups.
• Locally managed tablespaces—This feature enhances space management performance.

In addition to this being my first RAC install, this is also my first time to use ASM (Automatic Storage Management). Am I a glutton for punishment or what? New to RAC and ASM at the same time.