Database Reference
In-Depth Information
RAP Testing Phase I—Stability Testing of the Cluster
During this phase of the test, the cluster is verified for failure of components and the stability of the other components
in the cluster. This is performed with the help of the system administrator by manually creating physical component
failure during database activity.
RAP Testing Phase II—Availability and Load Balancing
During this phase of the test, the user application creates constant load; servers are crashed randomly; and the user
failover from one instance to the other is observed. The purpose of this test is to ensure that the application and
SQL*Net connections are configured for user failover with minimal transaction loss. During this phase of the test,
RAC functionality such as TAF (Transparent Application Failover), FAN (Fast Application Notification), FCF
(Fast Connection Failover), and RTLB (run-time load balancing) features are all tested.
If the proposed configuration also includes disaster recovery, failover and switchover between the primary site
and the secondary site should also be incorporated in this phase of the tests.
RAP Testing Phase III—High Availability
Whereas RAC provides availability within the data center, it does not provide availability if the entire data center
was to fail due to disasters from earthquake, floods, and so forth. Implementing a disaster recovery (DR) location,
which is normally of a similar configuration, provides this level of availability; and to keep the databases identical to
the primary site, a physical standby database is implemented. Testing between the primary site and DR sites should
also be included as part of RAP testing. Both failover and switchover testing between primary and DR sites should be
tested. Along with this testing the application should also be tested against both the sites.
RAP Testing Phase IV—Backup and Recovery
During this phase of the tests, the database backup and recovery features are tested. As part of the recovery testing,
recovery scenarios from database corruption, loss of control file, or losses of server parameter file (spfile) are tested.
This phase of testing also includes tuning the recovery functionality, taking into account the mean time to failure
(MTTF), mean time between failures (MTBF), and so forth and includes sizing of redo logs and tuning the instance
recovery parameters.
RAP Testing Phase V—Hardware Scalability
The hardware components are tested and tuned to get maximum scalability. Using third party load testing tools,
the servers and the database are put to high loads and the various scalable components—for example, interconnect,
memory, and so forth—are sized and tuned. The results from these tests are used as baselines for the next step.
RAP Testing Phase VI—Database Scalability
Test the scalability of the configuration using the application to generate the required workload. These tests help
determine the maximum user workload that the clustered configuration can accommodate.
RAP Testing Phase VII—Application Scalability
Test the scalability of the configuration using the application to generate the required workload. These tests help
determine the maximum user workload that the clustered configuration can accommodate.
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