Storage Foundation for Oracle® RAC 7.4.1 Configuration and Upgrade Guide - Solaris

About agents

An agent is defined as a process that starts, stops, and monitors all configured resources of a type, and reports their status to Cluster Server (VCS). Agents have both entry points and attributes. Entry points are also known as agent functions and are referred to as "agent functions" throughout the document.

Attributes contain data about the agent. An attribute has a definition and a value. You change attribute values to configure resources, which are defined as the individual components that work together to provide application services to the public network. For example, a resource may be a physical component such as a disk or a network interface card, a software component such as Oracle or a web server, or a configuration component such as an IP address or mounted file system.

Attributes are either optional or required, although sometimes the attributes that are optional in one configuration may be required in other configurations. Many optional attributes have predefined or default values, which you should change as required. A variety of internal use only attributes also exist. Do not modify these attributes - modifying them can lead to significant problems for your clusters. Attributes have type and dimension. Some attribute values can accept numbers, others can accept alphanumeric values or groups of alphanumeric values, while others are simple boolean on/off values.

The entry points and attributes for each SF Oracle RAC agent are described in this appendix.