Can you have load balancing with Failsafe?

[ssmith]

Can you load balance with Oracle Failsafe? In a metalink note it says the following:
Fail Safe has two principal uses:

Allows an Oracle database, Oracle Forms, or Oracle Reports to run on either node of a cluster, for continued availability in the event of node downtime.
Shares workload between the cluster nodes, eliminating the need to have a standby machine that, typically, is idle and thus underutilized.

but this has confused me as I thought with Oracle Failsafe, only 1 node can access the database at one time.

[jmodic]

You are correct, you can only access the database from one node at a time. And no, you can not have true load balancing with Fail Safe.

What they probably mean in that article on Metalink is this:
- You have one database instance and one Oracle Forms/Reports server. They can be running:
a) each on separate server (which impose you have two machines)
b) both on the same server (which impose you have only one machine)

Now you want to be prepared for any failure, so you configure two machines in two-node cluster and install Fail Safe on top of that.

Now if your previous configuration was a), then now you would still run database instance and Forms server on separate machines, but now each of those two machines act as a bacup node for the other node in a cluster.

If your previous configuration was b), then now you would have much higher availability and at the same time you are balancing your load somehow - one server will take a load of database server and the other one will take load of Forms server.