Oracle RMAN is a powerful tool with many features for recovering datafiles, tablespaces or even single blocks, as well as cloning databases for non production uses. However restoring a database to an entirely different server (or set of servers) it was backed up from is a somewhat cumbersome process.
In this post we will restore an RMAN backup to a new host, keeping the same database name and datafile names.
When using RMAN to restore a database to a new host, the recover database step fails with:
Crosschecked 43 objects PSDRPC returns significant error 3113. RMAN-00571: =========================================================== RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS =============== RMAN-00571: =========================================================== RMAN-03002: failure of recover command at 03/18/2017 19:31:23 ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel
Increasingly the old paradigm of nightly backing up your large Oracle database to tape, or writing the backup to a NAS share which is then mysteriously swept to tape by some unseen force (the Sys Admins), is becoming an unsustainable approach when backup windows are shrinking, 24/7 availability is becoming the norm and databases are getting larger and larger.
Backup Appliances, such as Sun’s ZDLRA or EMC’s Data Domain, offer many performance and manageability advantages over traditional approaches, and much of the work of traditional backup software is now baked into the appliance itself.
A modern database backup and recovery appliance should include features such as data encryption, compression, de-duplication and remote replication as standard features, to offload those functions from the host CPUs which we want to dedicate to running the database software.
EMC’s Data Domain includes SISL technology – Stream-Informed Segment Layout – to yield some very impressive data reduction numbers using a combination of de-duplication and compression.
But what happens if we choose to use RMAN features in addition to those offered by the backup applicance? What happens if we try to encrypt, de-duplicate, or compress, an RMAN backupset that is itself encrypted or compressed?
So your dutiful Infrastructure Team upgrades the Data Domain backup appliance with the latest DD OS code and patches, bringing you up to the latest patch level.
After this, your RMAN backups using DD Boost start failing, and checking the sbtio.log file, which is found in the user dump destination, we see entries like this:
SBT-27970 (211074992) 04/01/16 21:45:01 ERR : [6D42:C94BFB0] ddp_open_file() failed for File: dd0205_boost/XIO11WSB_df_svr1vlas_1_1.bk, Err: 5034-nfs create failed (nfs: Permission denied) SBT-27970 (211074992) 04/01/16 21:45:01 error 7501: sbtbackup: Could not create file XIO11WSB_df_svr1vlas_1_1.bk on host rstdd0205mgmt.us.oracle.com, error 5034 SBT-27973 (227712944) 04/01/16 21:45:01 ERR : [6D45:D929FB0] ddp_open_file() failed for File: dd0205_boost/XIO11WSB_df_t0r1vlas_1_1.bk, Err: 5034-nfs create failed (nfs: Permission denied) SBT-27973 (227712944) 04/01/16 21:45:01 error 7501: sbtbackup: Could not create file XIO11WSB_df_t0r1vlas_1_1.bk on host rstdd0205mgmt.us.oracle.com, error 5034
Here’s a scenario I’ve been asked about a few times.
The DBA has backed up the database using RMAN and Data Domain DDBoost and dutifully stored details of the backup in the RMAN catalog.
But then he needs to restore and recover the database to a new server without the RMAN catalog.
This can happen, for example, if an entire data center goes down. Many Data Domain users use the automatic replication option, whereby Data Domain will replicate RMAN backupsets from one device to another, often to a remote data center, but without the original RMAN catalog to inspect, how do we restore and recover our database?
In an earlier post, I looked at using RMAN managed replication to make two copies of an RMAN backupset to two separate Data Domains.
In the post Replicating an RMAN Backupset with Data Domain and DD Boost I then restored the database from the secondary copy to demonstrate that RMAN managed replication could be a useful tool for DBAs to protect against data center failures.
In this example however, I am going to use Data Domain’s native Mtree replication instead of RMAN’s managed replication.
In this post, we will replicate an RMAN backupsets using RMAN managed replication and DD Boost.
In an earlier post, I showed how it was possible to use Data Domain’s Mtree replication to ensure that your Oracle RMAN backups are safely replicated to a second backup appliance when using Data Domain as an NFS target.
Replicating the RMAN backupset is important to protect databases from failures that might affect a whole data center, such as prolonged power or network failures, or events such as a flood that might destroy infrastructure.
These scenarios are rare but should they occur, having the RMAN backups of our databases available at a second location can be the different between an organization surviving such an event, or not.
In this post, we are going to install the DD Boost module for Oracle RMAN.
In the previous post, Configuring DD Boost Replication for Oracle RMAN, we enabled DD Boost on the Data Domain and set up storage units that replicate automatically between sites.
In this post, we are going to install and configure the DD Boost for Oracle RMAN module so that our RMAN backups can leverage the performance benefits of DD Boost.
In this post, we are going to install the DD Boost module for Oracle RMAN.
DD Boost is an optional module that works with Data Domain and a number of applications and databases, including Oracle. DD Boost moves some of the sophisticated deduplication process from the Data Domain appliance to the database server, resulting in a dramatic reduction in network bandwidth and backup times.
A greater than fifty percent reduction in backup times for a full level zero RMAN backup is typical when switching to DD Boost although as always, your mileage may vary.
In this post, I will demonstrate how to set up Data Domain as a backup target for RMAN using NFS.
This is a basic process that involves creating the storage unit on the Data Domain, configuring NFS and then testing the backup. The post will serve as a basis for future posts where we will cover Mtree replication in Data Domain, and the acceleration option called DD Boost.
the gruffdba 