Today, I am start writing about 10g RAC on this blog. First we discuss about major component in 10g RAC. We can categories 10g RAC component between Hardware and Software level.

In Hardware level, three major components are Shared Disk Storage, Private network and Public Network.

In RAC architecture, we need Shared Disk Storage because the database file, redo logs and control files (also OCR and VOTING Disk) must be accessible by each node.

For Shared Disk configuration, we can use SCSI (just a Bunch of Disk), Storage Area network(SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS)

Each node must be connected to all other node via private high-speed network in RAC architecture.

Each node must be assign public IP address. We must assign a virtual IP address (VIP) for maintain high availability. At the time of node failure, the failed node's IP address can be reassigned to a surviving node to allow applications to continue accessing the database through the same IP address.

In Software Level, also three major components are OS, Clusterware Software and Storage Mechanism we would like to use for the database (OCFS/ASM/RAW)

At the time of RAC implementation, be ensure that we have install all necessary software package, setting kernel parameter, configure the Network, configure the disk device and create directory structure and also ensure Oracle clusterware have install on each cluster node.

We can use following file storage mechanism for the oracle clusterware component and database componentt:

For Clusteware Component:

OCFS (Release 1 or 2)
Raw devices
Third party cluster filesystem such as GPFS or Veritas

For RAC database storage:

OCFS (Release 1 or 2)
ASM
Raw devices
Third party cluster filesystem such as GPFS or Veritas