Oracle RAC Instances May Become Unavailable on Newly Added Nodes (4723575)

Problem Summary: Installing Sun Cluster support for RAC on a newly added node will cause unavailability of Oracle RAC instances.

Workaround: To add a node into a cluster currently running with Oracle RAC support, without losing availability of the Oracle RAC database, requires special installation steps. The example shown below describes going from a 3–node cluster to a 4–node cluster, with Oracle RAC running on nodes 1, 2, and 3:

1. Install the Sun Cluster software on the new node (node 4).

   Note: Do not install the RAC support packages as this time.

2. Reboot the new node into the cluster.

3. Once the new node has joined the cluster, shutdown the Oracle RAC database on one of the nodes where it is already running (node 1, in this example).

4. Reboot the node where the database was just shutdown (node 1).

5. Once the node (node 1) is back up, start the Oracle database on that node to resume database service.

6. If a single node is capable of handling the database workload, shutdown the database on the remaining nodes (nodes 2 and 3), and reboot these nodes. If more than one node is required to support the database workload, do them one at a time as described in steps 3 to 5.

7. Once all nodes have been rebooted, it is safe to install the Oracle RAC support packages on the new node.