Single license / Standby Server Preparedness

Question

I have a production server with a Standard Edition One single CPU license. I need to be ready in case the server has a problem and I need to stand up a new server.
At what point is it required to buy another license?
Case 1:
Standby Server: Oracle is not installed.
Primary Server does level 0, level 1 backups to the Flash Recovery Area. The backups are copied the Standby server each night. Furthermore the archive logs are copied to Standby as they are created.
Recovery would involve, installing Oracle and then using rman to restore and recover.
Case 2:
Standby Server: Oracle is installed, it only has the sample schema and is shutdown.
Primary Server does level 0, level 1 backups to the Flash Recovery Area. The backups are copied the Standby server each night. Furthermore the archive logs are copied to Standby as they are created.
Recovery would involve, starting Oracle and then using rman to restore and recover from the FRA.
Case 3:
Standby Server: Oracle is installed, communicates to Primary via Net8, has a copy of the primary database, is mounted and applying archive logs throughout the day.
Primary Server does level 0, level 1 backups to the Flash Recovery Area. The backups are copied the Standby server each night. Furthermore the archive logs are copied to Standby as they are created. Standby applies the arcivelogs via .bat script.
Recovery would involve, applying the last archive log and opening.
I’m trying to find the fastest road to recovering to a new server without needing to shell out $5k for a license and another $1k per year for support.

Answer 1

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I'm pretty sure doing any of my proposed solutions is of the developer license, as this a production environment. It seems like it a violation of the license to have Oracle installed on 2 servers even if one is shutdown.
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That would be my opinion as well.
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It's like Oracle requires us to install it on the 2nd server only when the 1st server it out of commission. I really don't know.
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Still don't know why you don't have an image backup of the disk partition that Oracle consumes.
I have multiple OS's installed on machines in their own partitions. On Linux you can easily use the DD command to copy an entire partition, sector by sector, to a backup file. Restoring it takes only a few minutes even for a 20 GB partition. An Oracle-only installation is nowhere near that size.
I can restore the OS or an installed app in a few minutes from an image backup. This is really easy on Linux since there is no registry to deal with. At some point you need to start heading towards virtual disks.
Using Oracle's VM technology you just have a VM template (image) that gets deployed to a server. You only need the license for the servers you actually deploy to. So if a server goes down you redeploy the OS template to another server and keep right on trucking.
You should really look into VM and start getting familiar with it. It is a game changer.
The Oracle VM Templates main page is
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/vm/database-092479.html
They have a VM Templates for RAC also.
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/vm/rac-template-11grel2-166623.html
Using Oracle's virtual box you have plenty of pre-built developer VMs available for download
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/developer-vm/index.html
And plenty of Oracle-provided articles about how to use VirtualBox and those templates
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-admin/howto-use-vb-templates-1695904.html
I have a single server that has multiple VMs running on it for different OSs including Windows XP. I rarely pick up any viruses because each system is in its own virtual machine. Periodically I just redeploy a VM template for XP and start fresh. Important files and page files are on on high-speed shared drives.
You are missing out on the revolution if you haven't ventured into the VM area yet.