Since the introduction of Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) in Oracle Database 9i, users have been taking advantage of the world’s only scale-everything, highly available database architecture. Before this release, databases were confined to running on a single server, which left it vulnerable to unexpected downtime in the event of a hardware failure. Oracle RAC was designed to allow a single Oracle Database to run across multiple servers to maximize availability and enable horizontal scalability. So, how can users nowadays take advantage of Oracle RAC in the cloud?
Oracle RAC has become essential for any business-critical production applications that need reduced downtime from local failures or most common planned maintenance activities. This is true for cloud, on-premises, or hybrid IT deployments. That is why Oracle RAC has become the cornerstone for Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture and it can be seen as an integral part of product and services built on Oracle Exadata platform.
Oracle RAC can be licensed in both on-premises and cloud environments. Oracle RAC was first introduced for on-premises as an option to Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. In the cloud, Oracle RAC is available with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Database services supporting Oracle RAC; such as BaseDB Extreme Performance, Exadata Database Service, and Autonomous Database. Utilizing cloud automation, Oracle databases are automatically configured with Oracle RAC when they are provisioned.
Oracle Database is approved to run on cloud computing environments from only three Authorized Cloud Environments (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure Platform, Google Cloud Platform). However, Oracle does not support Oracle RAC (or RAC One Node) on these three clouds or any Non-Oracle Public Cloud Environment. The use of Oracle Support for Oracle RAC, including but not limited to applying patches and updates to Oracle RAC databases, is prohibited in any Non-Oracle Public Cloud Environment. Please see MOS note 2688277.1 for detailed Oracle Database Support for Non-Oracle Public Cloud Environments.
For customers that can benefit from the performance, scalability, and workload availability of Oracle RAC in non-Oracle clouds, they now can with Oracle’s multicloud solutions. Partnering with Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS, Exadata Database Service and Autonomous Database is collocated in a partner’s data center and region to provide low latency between their choice of applications and the Oracle Database running Oracle RAC.
Oracle operates and manages these OCI services directly in the same way it does today for the same services running in OCI. For more information, please check the Oracle Multicloud page.
In summary, customers have benefitted from Oracle RAC’s mission-critical scalability and availability features for over 23 years. RAC has evolved to be an intricate and automated part of the Oracle Database Service offerings in OCI and across our multicloud partners.
Freddy leads the Oracle Global Multicloud strategy in the Outbound Product Management group for Mission Critical Databases. Freddy has over 20 years of experience managing Business Development organizations, Enterprise Architecture teams, and field support.
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