About the VCS Enterprise Agent for Oracle

The VCS enterprise agent for Oracle monitors the Oracle and listener processes, brings them online, and takes them offline.

The package contains two VCS agents:

• The Oracle agent, which monitors the Oracle database processes.
• The Netlsnr agent, which monitors the listener process.

The agents include VCS type declarations and agent executables, and are represented with the Oracle and Netlsnr resource types, respectively. Both agents work together to make Oracle highly available in a VCS cluster.

Oracle Agent

The Oracle agent monitors the database processes. Specific agent operations include:

• Online---Starts the Oracle database by using the following svrmgrl or sqlplus command:

   startup pfile=$PFile force

You can also configure the agent to start the database using different Startup options for Oracle. See Startup Options for more information about these options.

• Offline---Stops the Oracle database with the specified options by using the following svrmgrl or sqlplus command:

   shutdown immediate

You can also configure the agent to stop the database using different Shutdown options for Oracle. See Shutdown Options for more information about these options.

• Monitor---The Oracle agent provides two levels of monitoring: basic and detail. In the basic monitoring mode, the agent scans the process table for the ora_dbw, ora_smon, ora_pmon, and ora_lgwr processes to verify Oracle is running. In the detail monitoring mode, the agent performs a transaction on a test table in the database to ensure that Oracle is functioning properly.
• Clean---Forcibly stops the Oracle database by using the following svrmgrl or sqlplus command:

   shutdown abort

If the process does not respond to the shutdown command, the agent scans the process table for processes associated with the configured instance and kills them.

• Info---Provides static and dynamic information about the state of the database. See Info Entry Point for more information.
• Action---Performs predefined actions on a resource. See Action Entry Point for more information.