Set up an HA/DR architecture for Oracle E-Business Suite on Amazon RDS Custom with an active standby database

Simon Cunningham, Jaydeep Nandy, and Nitin Saxena, Amazon Web Services

Summary

This pattern describes how you can architect your Oracle E-Business solution on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Custom for high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) by setting up an Amazon RDS Custom read replica database in another Amazon Web Services (AWS) Availability Zone and converting it to an active standby database. The creation of the Amazon RDS Custom read replica is fully automated through the AWS Management Console.

This pattern doesn’t discuss the steps for adding additional application tiers and shared file systems, which can also be part of an HA/DR architecture. For more information about those topics, see the following Oracle Support Notes: 1375769.1, 1375670.1, and 1383621.1 (section 5, Advanced Cloning Options). (Access requires an Oracle Support account.)

To migrate E-Business Suite system to a single-tier, Single-AZ architecture on Amazon Web Services (AWS), see the pattern Migrate Oracle E-Business Suite to Amazon RDS Custom.

Oracle E-Business Suite is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution for automating enterprise-wide processes such as financials, human resources, supply chains, and manufacturing. It has a three-tier architecture: client, application, and database. Previously, you had to run your E-Business Suite database on a self-managed Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, but you can now benefit from Amazon RDS Custom.  

Prerequisites and limitations

Prerequisites

Limitations

Product versions

For Oracle Database versions and instance classes supported by Amazon RDS Custom, see Requirements and limitations for Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle.

Architecture

The following diagram illustrates a representative architecture for E-Business Suite on AWS that includes multiple Availability Zones and application tiers in an active/passive setup. The database uses an Amazon RDS Custom DB instance and Amazon RDS Custom read replica. The read replica uses Active Data Guard to replicate to another Availability Zone. You can also use the read replica to offload read traffic on the primary database and for reporting purposes.

For more information, see Working with read replicas for Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle in the Amazon RDS documentation. 

The Amazon RDS Custom read replica is created by default as mounted. However, if you want to offload some of your read-only workloads to the standby database to reduce the load on your primary database, you can manually change the mode of mounted replicas to read-only by following the steps in the Epics section. A typical use case for this would be to run your reports from the standby database. Changing to read-only requires an active standby database license. 

When you create a read replica on AWS, the system uses Oracle Data Guard broker under the covers.  This configuration is automatically generated and set up in Maximum Performance mode as follows:

DGMGRL> show configuration
Configuration - rds_dg
  Protection Mode: MaxPerformance
  Members:
  vis_a - Primary database
    vis_b - Physical standby database 
Fast-Start Failover: DISABLED
Configuration Status:
SUCCESS   (status updated 58 seconds ago)

Tools

AWS services

Other tools

Epics

$ sudo su - rdsdb
-bash-4.2$ sql
SQL> select process,status,sequence# from v$managed_standby;

PROCESS    STATUS        SEQUENCE#
--------- ------------ ----------
ARCH       CLOSING            3956
ARCH       CONNECTED             0
ARCH       CLOSING            3955
ARCH       CLOSING            3957
RFS        IDLE                  0
RFS        IDLE               3958
MRP0       APPLYING_LOG       3958
SQL> select name, database_role, open_mode from v$database;

NAME       DATABASE_ROLE    OPEN_MODE
--------- ---------------- --------------------
VIS        PHYSICAL STANDBY MOUNTED
SQL> alter database recover managed standby database cancel;
Database altered.
Open the standby database
SQL> alter database open;
Database altered.
SQL> select name, database_role, open_mode from v$database;

NAME       DATABASE_ROLE    OPEN_MODE
--------- ---------------- --------------------
VIS        PHYSICAL STANDBY READ ONLY

SQL>   alter database recover managed standby database using current logfile disconnect from session;
Database altered

SQL> select name, database_role, open_mode from v$database;
NAME      DATABASE_ROLE    OPEN_MODE
--------- ---------------- --------------------
VIS       PHYSICAL STANDBY READ ONLY WITH APPLY

SQL> select process,status,sequence# from v$managed_standby;
PROCESS    STATUS        SEQUENCE#
--------- ------------ ----------
ARCH       CLOSING            3956
ARCH       CONNECTED             0
ARCH       CLOSING            3955
ARCH       CLOSING            3957
RFS        IDLE                  0
RFS        IDLE               3958
MRP0       APPLYING_LOG       3958
 
SQL> select open_mode from v$database;
OPEN_MODE
--------------------
READ ONLY WITH APPLY

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