Within the environment, the Oracle compute instance is deployed via an Azure services VM console. There are multiple Azure instance types available from the console. NetApp recommends deploying a database-oriented Azure VM instance that meets your expected workload.

Oracle database storage on the other hand is deployed with the Azure NetApp Files service available from Azure console. The Oracle binary, data, or log volumes are subsequently presented and mounted on an Azure VM instance Linux host.

In many respects, the implementation of Azure NetApp Files in Azure cloud is very similar to an on-premises ONTAP data storage architecture with many built-in redundancies, such as RAID and dual controllers. For disaster recovery, a standby site can be setup in different regions and database can be synced up with the primary site using application-level replication (for example, Oracle Data Guard).

In our test validation for Oracle database deployment and data protection, the Oracle database is deployed on a single Azure VM as illustrated in the following diagram:

The Azure Oracle environment can be managed with an Ansible controller node for automation using tool kits provided by NetApp for database deployment, backup, recovery, and database migration. Any updates to the Oracle Azure VM instance operating-system kernel or Oracle patching can be performed in parallel to keep the primary and standby in sync. In fact, the initial toolkits can be easily expanded to perform daily Oracle tasks if needed. If you need help to set up a CLI Ansible controller, see NetApp Solution Automation to get started.