Application Full-stack Disaster Recovery Automation using Oracle Site Guard

Oracle Site Guard has been officially deprecated,for more details refer to the Deprecation of Oracle Site Guard in Enterprise Manager support document. As customers continue to adopt cloud-first strategies, Oracle recommends transitioning to OCI Full Stack Disaster Recovery (Full Stack DR), a fully managed, cloud-native DRaaS solution designed to simplify and automate disaster recovery operations across regions in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. If you’re looking for a more modern, scalable, and application-aware approach to disaster recovery, Full Stack DR is the way forward.

One of the critical questions that every business owner faces is how quickly applications will be back online in a planned or an unplanned Disaster Recovery (DR) scenario. Generally, it will affect an entire site hosting many components like Oracle Databases, Oracle Weblogic Servers, and Oracle and non-Oracle components such as microservices, which serve various critical applications.

Many system administrators will be using their run books or some procedures as part of their DR Plan. Though those will work, there are a variety of challenges that one often encounters while taking such an approach, including:

•  Is replication properly working from Production to DR site for all layers such as Applications, Databases, etc.?
•  Need to follow the various Startup and Shutdown Procedures for each tier
•  Infra stack dependencies and ordering required during role transitions
•  Complete application failover involves failover of both Active Data Guard and file system storage replication
•  Proper DR planning and testing
•  Availability of technical experts like DBA, Application administrators

Oracle provides an integrated solution for full-stack DR within Oracle Enterprise Manager called Oracle Site Guard to address these common challenges. Oracle Site Guard makes DR operations Simple, reliable, testable, repeatable, and extensible. Oracle Site Guard is part of Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA), as shown in the diagram below, with direct integration into Oracle Data Guard, making it an ideal supplement to the Oracle MAA Gold Tier. As Oracle Site Guard is integrated directly into Oracle Enterprise Manager, the full-stack DR capabilities can be utilized alongside the monitoring, alerting, and configuration management built into the OEM platform.

Overview of Oracle Site Guard:

Oracle Site Guard is a disaster-recovery solution that enables administrators to automate complete site switchover or failover. It orchestrates the coordinated failover of Oracle Middleware, Oracle Applications (i.e., EBS, PeopleSoft), and Oracle Databases. The overall benefits include the following:

• Fully automate disaster recovery operations and launch them with a single click
• Minimizes disaster-recovery time by optimizing failover orchestration
• Reduces human error through automation and validation
• Extensibility allows the inclusion of other components as part of the application failover orchestration
• Eliminates the need for special skills by utilizing a single pane of glass (Oracle Enterprise Manager)
• Assure disaster recovery readiness using on-demand or scheduled disaster recovery drills
• Integrates with underlying replication mechanisms that synchronize primary and standby environments and protect mission-critical data (i.e., Oracle Data Guard replication, ZFS replication)
• Employs Oracle Enterprise Manager capabilities such as Job System for distributed scripting, named credentials for access control, agents for remote execution, Systems for logical site definition, and the OEM UI or EMCLI for command-line operations
• Licensed as a part of Enterprise Manager WebLogic Server Management Pack Enterprise Edition, Configuration Management Pack for Applications, and/or Oracle Database Lifecycle Management Pack depending on the application components included in the orchestration
• Available as EM Cloud Control Plug-in and shipped as part of FMW Plug-in (included by default when OEM is installed).

​ Where to learn more about Oracle Site Guard?Wher e

The Oracle MAA Product Management team has several sessions (refer to the table below) during the upcoming Oracle Sangam 2021 conference. You can easily register for one or more of these sessions to learn more about the aforementioned technologies. During this event, I will be speaking about Application Full Stack Disaster Recovery Automation using Oracle Site Guard on Dec 4th – 16:30- 17:30 IST. In the session, I will be popping the hood of Site Guard and discussing the tech technical details for using the solution to run DR operations at scale. Do join the event.

​ Oracle Sangam 2021 is an annual event organized by All India Oracle uses group (AIOUG)  and happening from Dec 3rd till Dec 19th, completely Virtual event, and its free to attend 🙂

Apart from this, many other sessions are happening, so please check out the Sangam21 Registration link. Join the Sangam21 event for deep technical sessions, masterclasses, hands-on labs, Fireside chats, keynotes, and Oracle ACE Community sessions.