Introduction:
NetApp® SnapCenter is a centralized product suite that provides a single pane of glass management for a variety of applications, databases and hypervisors. Through SnapCenter, you can centrally deploy plug-ins to remote hosts, schedule and monitor backups, Clone, Restore and perform Backup verification operations. SnapCenter uses centralized role-based access control (RBAC) and offers reports and centralized dashboard across all plug-ins. The Plug-in for Oracle is a host-side component of the NetApp integrated storage solution offering application-aware backup management, restore, recovery, and Cloning of Oracle Database.
Let’s learn how to perform Data protection and management for Oracle databases using SnapCenter software.
Step1: Assuming that the SnapCenter software is already installed and following pre-requisites are performed by your Storage/Server administrators. This is a One-Time activity.
- Register NetApp storage SVM’s
- Register RUNAS credentials for all the Hosts to avoid the repeated use of credentials during workflows
- Register your Linux Hosts to the SnapCenter server which auto installs Oracle plugins to these hosts and their clustered hosts (if any).
- Auto-discover the Oracle databases in Inventory page.
Detailed steps for installation and configuration is mentioned below
Installation and Setup Guide
Step2: Create Backup Policies and Datasets for your Oracle databases [One-Time activity]
Login as Oracle Admin or SnapCenter admin user on the SnapCenter GUI:-
- Open Policies tab and click Add
- Provide policy name and select the scope of Backup
- Choose Archivelog management or pruning [ if required]
- Provide your Backup retention based on days or number
- Choose secondary replication option such SnapVault /Mirror to archive your backups to a secondary destination for a longer retention
- Provide any schedules [ If required ]
- Click Finish and confirm the policies are created .
- Open Datasets tab and click new backup dataset
- Provide Dataset name and associate this dataset to a list of policies created earlier.
- Select a given database that needs to be backed up. You can also group multiple databases in a single dataset and Click finish
Step 3: Take an Online/ Offline Backup of your Oracle database
Method 1-
- Select a given Dataset and click Backup Now
- Choose a given policy and click OK. The Backup takes few seconds to minutes to complete.
- Track the job id in Monitor screen. You can track the progress of each Backup at the granular level
- You can also view the logs or download them from Monitor page
- If you have secondary replication enabled in the Backup policy , the Backup snapshots will get updated automatically to the secondary storage.
Method 2-
- Choose a given and click Backup
- Create your own dataset and click Ok. Check Monitor screen to track the progress of the backup.
Step 4: Create a clone of your Oracle database using a given Snapshot Oracle Backup
- Open Inventory page , choose a given database and click clone backup
- On the Clone wizard , Enter the Target SID name and choose a given backup from either primary or secondary replicated storage
- Choose the host and the location where the cloned database to be staged
- Provide Oracle Home settings
- Choose recovery scope for the clone [ SCN , DATE AND TIME , No recovery]
- Click finish and track the Job progress in Monitor screen.
Step 5: Perform a Restore/Recovery Operation for a given Pluggable database on a given Container database
- Open Inventory page , choose a given database and click Restore
- On the Restore wizard, choose a preferred backup for your restore operation.
- Select the scope of restore [ datafiles , PDB tablespaces ,PDB ,Controlfiles ]
- Select the Recovery scope as either All Logs or Date and Time or No recovery.
- Enable the checkbox for database open option after recovery and click finish.
- Track the progress in the Monitor screen
Step 6: Dashboard and Reports
Dashboards
- To check the overall Dashboard of all the Jobs , Open Dashboard page and review the success , failure and warning counts for each jobs [ Backups ,restore, clone and secondary replication]
- Check for Clone savings after each clone in GB /TB
Reports
- Open reports page, use the filters for selecting the database, date and time and generate detailed reports for Backup, Clone and restore.
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