MSCS: R/3 Enterprise on Oracle

Dear all,

We are considering whether to use MSCS or not in the following environment.

OS: Windows 2003

DB: Oracle 9i

SAP: R/3 4.7

HW: SAP certified

Now I have several questions:

1. Is it common to run SAP on one node and DB on the other?

2. When failover happens, what exactly happens to end users (such as re-login required or not):

a) In case of failure of CI,

b) In case of failure of Oracle,

3. The nodes really need to be in Active Directory?

4. How longer is average failover procedure?

Thank you very much for your any input!!!

Regards,

Kazuya