F5 Custom Monitor with Oracle Data Guard

Hi Scott, this can be done with Big-IP, but I'm pretty sure you will need Version9 or 10 software.

 

 

If I understand what you want to do here, you want only the db server that is in the Primary Data Guard role to take connections, and keep the Standby server in the pool, but not taking connections. You could do this by writing a custome database monitor, and sending a SQL query to each server, asking each for it's current role. If the answer to the query is "primary", that server would be marked up, and Big-IP would send connections to it. The other server, the query response would be "standby" ( therefore, not Primary ), and the F5 would think the server is down, and not send any connections to it. When the roles are reversed, the response would be reversed, so new connections would then go to the former standby server. You would want to match the monitor interval and timeouts to the speed at which your servers are able to facilitate a role reversal. To determine the Data Guard Role, the sql query in the db monitor could query the database_role column from v$database view. For more details, see Oracle docs here:

 

 

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B13789_01/server.101/b10823/role_management.htm

 

 

https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/ltm_configuration_guide_10_0_0/ltm_monitors.html1210419

 

 

-Chris.