Oracle Clusterware Diagnosis

Abstract

Webster’s Dictionary’s definition for a cluster is “a number of similar things that occur together.” A clustered system occurs when things of the same sort are organized together or growing together to form or represent a group of their respective kind. For example, a number of people, flowers, or things grouped together forms a cluster. Similarly, a group of independent hardware systems or nodes that is interconnected to provide a single computer source is referred to as a hardware cluster. Unlike with flowers and other objects, if one node in a cluster fails, its workload is automatically distributed among the surviving nodes. This process of automatically distributing the workload to other available nodes reduces the downtime of the entire system. Clustering is an architecture that keeps systems running in the event of a single-system failure. Clustering provides maximum scalability by grouping separate servers into a single computing facility. Clusters have the potential to provide excellent price and performance advantages over traditional mainframe systems in many areas, such as availability, scalability, manageability, and recoverability.