Failover of redundant oracle servers

[tomcola]

My problem is:
we are currently designing a system with redundant oracle servers (A-primary, B-backup). When A goes down the system will automatically failover to B. The problem is when A is restored we are told we will not be able to failback to A unless we take both servers off-line to rebuild A. Only after that happens will we return to full failover capability.

Anyone knows if this is true? Any advice such as third party software or an alternative database product?

We are designing for the latest version of Oracle.

Thanks
Tomcola

 

[bjverzal]

What is your hardware platform ?

Bill.

 

[crowe]

what is your cluster/failover software?

crowe

 

[tomcola]

We are running Oracle on SUN Ultra 80 SPARC II. The failover capability is handled in a custom operating system also running on a UNIX SPARC machine

 

[lolboy89]

With Veritas Cluster Server this is not the case. You can fail to system b with no problems once system a has had the OS installed and is ready to host the Oracle DB then you can manually failback the Oracle instance back to system A.
Also VCS is fully supported with Oracle and they are currently working close with Oracle regarding 9i

 

[colint]

What centralised storage are you using, is this all local in campus or do you remote mirror your storage ?
The solution you are looking to implement is not uncommon.