Typical VCS cluster configuration in a virtual environment

A typical VCS cluster configuration for Oracle in a VMware virtual environment involves two or more virtual machines. The virtual machine on which the application is active, accesses a non-shared VMware VMDK or RDM disk that resides on a VMware datastore.

The virtual machines involved in the VCS cluster configuration may belong to a single ESX/ESXi host or could reside on separate ESX/ESXi hosts. If the virtual machines reside on separate ESX/ESXi hosts, the datastore on which the VMware VMDK or RDM disks (on which the application data is stored) reside must be accessible to each of these ESX/ESXi hosts.

The application binaries are installed on the virtual machines and the data files are installed on the VMware disk drive. The VCS agents monitor the application components and services, and the storage and network components that the application uses.

Figure: Typical VCS cluster configuration in a VMware virtual environment

Typical VCS cluster configuration in a VMware virtual environment

During a failover, the VCS storage agents move the VMware disks to the new system. The VCS network agents bring the network components online, and the application specific agents then start application services on the new system.