General RAC

• Is rcp and/or rsh required for normal Oracle RAC operation ?
• What is Cache Fusion and how does this affect applications?
• Is it difficult to transition (migrate) from Single Instance to Oracle RAC?
• What are the dependencies between OCFS and ASM in Oracle Database 10g ?
• Do we have to have Oracle Database on all nodes?
• What software is necessary for Oracle RAC? Does it have a separate installation CD to order?
• What Application Design considerations should I be aware of when moving to Oracle RAC?
• What kind of HW components do you recommend for the interconnect?
• How can a NAS storage vendor certify their storage solution for Oracle RAC ?
• My customer has an XA Application with a Oracle RAC Database, can I do Load Balancing across the Oracle RAC instances?
• Should the SCSI-3 reservation bit be set for our Oracle Clusterware only installation?
• How do I determine which node in the cluster is the "Master" node?
• Is Infiniband supported for the Oracle RAC interconnect?
• Where can I find a list of supported solutions to ensure NIC availability / redundancy (for the interconnect) per platform?
• Does Oracle support Oracle RAC in Solaris containers (a.k.a. Solaris Zones)?
• How to use VLANs in Oracle RAC?
• What is SCAN?
• Are there any issues for the interconnect when sharing the same switch as the public network by using VLAN to separate the network?
• I get the following error starting my Oracle RAC database, what do I do?
  WARNING: No cluster interconnect has been specified.
• Are block devices supported for OCR, Voting Disks, and ASM devices?
• If my OCR and Voting Disks are in ASM, can I shutdown the ASM instance?
• Is a relink required for the clusterware home after an OS upgrade?
• I have changed my spfile with alter system set parameter_name =.... scope=spfile. The spfile is on ASM storage and the database will not start.
• What combinations of Oracle Clusterware, Oracle RAC and ASM versions can I use?
• I had a 3 node Oracle RAC. One of the nodes had to be completely rebuilt as a result of a problem. As there are no backups, What is the proper procedure to remove the 3rd node from the cluster so it can be added back in?
• Does Weblogic (WLS) support Services, FAN/FCF, and the Load Balancing Advisory (LBA) with Oracle RAC?
• Are jumbo frames supported for the RAC interconnect?
• Are Sun Logical Domains (ldoms) supported with RAC?
• What is Standard Edition Oracle RAC?
• Where do I find Oracle Clusterware binaries and ASM binaries with Oracle Database 11g Release 2?
• I have the 11.2 Grid Infrastructure installed and now I want to install an earlier version of Oracle Database (11.1 or 10.2), is this supported ?
• I get an error with DBCA from 10.2 or 11.1 after I have installed the 11.2 Grid Infrastructure?
• Can I use iSCSI storage with my Oracle RAC cluster?
• What would you recommend to customer, Oracle Clusterware or Vendor Clusterware (I.E. HP Service Guard, HACMP, Sun Cluster, Veritas etc.) with Oracle Real Application Clusters?
• When configuring the NIC cards and switch for a GigE Interconnect should it be set to FULL or Half duplex in Oracle RAC?
• Can I use Oracle RAC in a distributed transaction processing environment?
• Can I run Oracle 9i RAC and Oracle RAC 10g in the same cluster?
• What storage is supported with Standard Edition Oracle RAC?
• What are the restrictions on the SID with an Oracle RAC database? Is it limited to 5 characters?
• Does Oracle Clusterware or Oracle Real Application Clusters support heterogeneous platforms?
• I want to use rconfig to convert a single instance to Oracle RAC but I am using raw devices in Oracle RAC. Does rconfig support RAW ?
• How many NICs do I need to implement Oracle RAC?
• Can we designate the place of archive logs on both ASM disk and regular file system, when we use SE RAC?
• Can my customer use Veritas Agents to manage their Oracle RAC database on Unix with SFRAC installed?
• Can I run more than one clustered database on a single Oracle RAC cluster?
• Is there a need to renice LMS processes in Oracle RAC 10g Release 2?
• Can I run Oracle RAC 10g with Oracle RAC 11g?
• Can I have multiple public networks accessing my Oracle RAC?
• I could not get the user equivalence check to work on my Solaris 10 server when trying to install 10.2.0.1 Oracle Clusterware. The install ran fine without issue. << Message: Result: User equivalence check failed for user "oracle". >>
• Is it supported to install Oracle Clusterware and Oracle RAC as different users?
• Why does the NOAC attribute need to be set on NFS mounted RAC Binaries?
• We are using Transparent Data Encryption (TDE).
  We create a wallet on node 1 and copy to nodes 2 & 3. Open the wallet and we are able to select encrypted data on all three nodes.
  Now, we want to REKEY the MASTER KEY. What do we have to do?
• How do I check for network problems on my interconect?
• The Veritas installation document on page 219 asks for setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH_64. Should I remove this?
• Why does netca always creates the listener which listens to public ip and not VIP only?
• Does changing uid or gid of the Oracle User affect Oracle Clusterware?
• Can we output the backupset onto regular file system directly (not onto flash recovery area) using RMAN command, when we use SE RAC?
• Is it a good idea to add anti-virus software to my RAC cluster?

RAC Assistance

• How do I use DBCA in silent mode to set up RAC and ASM?

High Availability

• Can RMAN backup Oracle Real Application Cluster databases?
• I am receiving an ORA-29740 error. What should I do?
• I have a 2 node Oracle RAC cluster, if I pull the interconnect on node 1 to simulate failure, why does node 2 reboot?
• Is Oracle Application Server integrated with FAN and FCF?
• How do I configure FCF with BPEL so I can use Oracle RAC 10g in the backend?
• Where can I find more information on cluster_interconnects?
• How does OCR mirror work? What happens if my OCR is lost/corrupt?
• If I change my cluster configuration, do I need to update the ONS configuration on my middle tier?
• Why do we have a Virtual IP (VIP) in Oracle RAC 10g or 11g? Why does it just return a dead connection when its primary node fails?
• What do the VIP resources do once they detect a node has failed/gone down? Are the VIPs automatically acquired, and published, or is manual intervention required? Are VIPs mandatory?
• If I use Services with Oracle RAC, do I still need to set up Load Balancing ?
• How can a customer mask the change in their clustered database configuration from their client or application? (I.E. So I do not have to change the connection string when I add a node to the Oracle RAC database)
• After executing DBMS_SERVICE.START_SERVICE, the service resource remains in an OFFLINE status when I display the cluster resource status. Is that expected behaviour ?
• Does Oracle support rolling upgrades in a cluster?
• What are my options for load balancing with Oracle RAC? Why do I get an uneven number of connections on my instances?
• What do I do if I am getting handshake failed messages in my ONS.LOG file every minute?
• What should I do to make my Oracle RAC deployment highly available?
• Can our Oracle RAC 10g VIP fail over from NIC to NIC as well as from node to node ?
• Is there a way to provide or configure HA for the interconnect using Infiniband on AIX ?
• I am using shared services which the following set in init.ora SQL> show parameters dispatchers=(protocol=TCP)(listener=listen ers_nl01)(con=500)(serv=oltp). I stopped my service with srvctl stop service but it is still registered with the listener and accepting connections. Is this expected?
• Is it possible to use SVRCTL start database with a user account other than oracle ( that is other than the owner of the oracle software)?
• With three primary load balancing options (client-side connect-time LB, server-side connect-time LB, and the runtime connection load balancing) Is it fair to say Runtime Connection Load Balancing is the only option to leverage FAN up/down events?
• What is Server-side Transparent Application Failover (TAF) and how do I use it?
• What is CLB_GOAL and how should I set it?
• What does the Virtual IP service do? I understand it is for failover but do we need a separate network card? Can we use the existing private/public cards? What would happen if we used the public ip?

High Availability -- FAN/FCF

• I want to configure a secure environment for ONS so have added a Wallet however I am seeing errors (SSL handshake failed) after adding the wallet?
• Do I need to install the ONS on all my mid-tier serves in order to enable JDBC Fast Connection Failover (FCF)?
• Will FAN/FCF work with the default database service?
• Will FAN work with SQLPlus?
• Why am I seeing the following warnings in my listener.log for my RAC 10g environment?
  WARNING: Subscription for node down event still pending
• Can I use the 10.2 JDBC driver with 10.1 database for FCF?
• What clients provide integration with FAN through FCF?
• Can I use TAF and FAN/FCF?
• How does the datasource properties initialLimit, minLimit, and maxLimit affect Fast Connection Failover processing with JDBC?
• Will FAN/OCI work with Instant Client?
• What type of callbacks are supported with OCI when using FAN/FCF?
• Does FCF for OCI react to FAN HA UP events?
• Can I use FAN/OCI with Pro*C?
• Do I have to link my OCI application with a thread library? Why?

Scalability

• I am seeing the wait events 'ges remote message', 'gcs remote message', and/or 'gcs for action'. What should I do about these?
• What are the changes in memory requirements from moving from single instance to RAC?
• What are my options for setting the Load Balancing Advisory GOAL on a Service?
• Will adding a new instance to my Oracle RAC database (new node to the cluster) allow me to scale the workload?
• How do I change my Veritas SF RAC installation to use UDP instead of LLT?
• Can I have different servers in my Oracle RAC? Can they be from different vendors? Can they be different sizes?
• What do I do if I see GC CR BLOCK LOST in my top 5 Timed Events in my AWR Report?
• A customer is currently using RAC in a 2 node environment. How should one review the ability to scale out to 4, 6, 8 or even more nodes? What should the requirements of a scale out test?
• What is the Load Balancing Advisory?
• How do I enable the load balancing advisory?
• How can I validate the scalability of my shared storage? (Tightly related to RAC / Application scalability)
• How many nodes are supported in a RAC Database?
• How do I measure the bandwidth utilization of my NIC or my interconnect?
• Does Database blocksize or tablespace blocksize affect how the data is passed across the interconnect?
• What is Runtime Connection Load Balancing?

Manageability

• How should I deal with space management? Do I need to set free lists and free list groups?
• I was installing Oracle 9i RAC and my Oracle files did not get copied to the remote node(s). What went wrong?
• How do I stop the GSD?
• How do I determine whether or not an OneOff patch is "rolling upgradeable"?
• Does Oracle RAC work with NTP (Network Time Protocol)?
• If I am using Vendor Clusterware such as Veritas, IBM, Sun or HP, do I still need Oracle Clusterware to run Oracle RAC 10g or Oracle RAC 11g?
• How is Oracle Enterprise Manager integrated with the Oracle RAC 11g Release 2 stack?
• What storage option should I use for Oracle RAC on Linux? ASM / OCFS / Raw Devices / Block Devices / Ext3 ?
• What are the implications of using srvctl disable for an instance in my Oracle RAC cluster? I want to have it available to start if I need it but at this time to not want to run this extra instance for this database.
• If using plsql native code, the plsql_native_library_dir needs to be defined. In an Oracle RAC environement, must the directory be in the shared storage?
• What is the purpose of the gsd service in Oracle 9i RAC?
• How do I identify which node was used to install the cluster software and/or database software?
• Are the Oracle Clusterware bundle patches cumulative, do they conflict with one another?
• I have added a second network to my cluster, can I load balance my users across this network?
• Srvctl cannot start instance, I get the following error PRKP-1001 CRS-0215, however sqlplus can start it on both nodes? What is the problem?
• When I look at ALL_SERVICES view in my database I see services I did not create, what are they for?
• I have 2 clusters named "crs" (the default), how do I get Grid Control to recognize them as targets?
• I found in 10.2 that the EM "Convert to Cluster Database" wizard would always fall over on the last step where it runs emca and needs to log into the new cluster database as dbsnmp to create the cluster database targets etc. I changed the password for the dbsnmp account to be dbsnmp (same as username) and it worked OK. Is this a known issue?
• What is the Cluster Verification Utiltiy (cluvfy)?
• What versions of the database can I use the cluster verification utility (cluvfy) with?

Platform Specific

• How many nodes can be had in an HP-UX/Solaris/AIX/Windows/Linux cluster?
• Is crossover cable supported as an interconnect with RAC on any platform ?
• Is it possible to run Oracle RAC on logical partitions (i.e. LPARs) or virtual separate servers.
• How do I check Oracle RAC certification?
• What is Oracle's position with respect to supporting RAC on Polyserve CFS?
• Can the Oracle Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) be used to create a database with Veritas DBE / AC 3.5?
• Is Veritas Storage Foundation supported with Oracle RAC?
• Is Oracle Database on VMware support? Is Oracle RAC on VMware supported?

Platform Specific -- Linux

• After installing patchset 9013 and patch_2313680 on Linux, the startup was very slow
• Is there a cluster file system (CFS) Available for Linux?
• Is the hangcheck timer still needed with Oracle RAC 10g and 11gR1?
• Oracle Clusterware fails to start after a reboot due to permissions on raw devices reverting to default values. How do I fix this?
• How do I configure raw devices in order to install Oracle Clusterware 10g on RHEL5 or OEL5?
• Can different releases of Oracle RAC be installed and run on the same physical Linux cluster?
• Is 3rd Party Clusterware supported on Linux such as Veritas or Redhat?
• A customer installed 10g Release 2 on Linux RH4 Update 2, 2.6.9-22.ELsmp #1 SMP x86_64 GNU/Linux, and got the error Error in invoking target 'all_no_orcl'. Customer ignored the error and the install succeeded without any other errors and oracle apparently worked fine. What should they do?
• Is OCFS2 certified with Oracle RAC 10g?
• How do I configure my RAC Cluster to use the RDS Infiniband?
• Customer did not load the hangcheck-timer before installing RAC, Can the customer just load the hangcheck-timer ?
• How to reorder or rename logical network interface (NIC) names in Linux
• Are Red Hat GFS and GULM certified for DLM?
• My customer is about to install 10202 clusterwere on new Linux machinges. He is getting "No ORACM running" error when run rootpre.sh and exited? Should he worry about this message?
• How to configure bonding on Suse SLES8.
• How to configure bonding on Suse SLES9.

Platform Specific -- Solaris

• In Solaris 10, do we need Sun Cluster to provide redundancy for the interconnect and multiple switches?
• Can I configure IPMP in Actie/Active to increase bandwidth of my interconnect?
• Does Sun Solaris have a multipathing solution ?

Platform Specific -- HP-UX

• Can I configure HP's Autoport aggregation for NIC Bonding after the install? (i.e. not present beforehand)
• Is HMP supported with Oracle RAC 10g or Oracle RAC 11g on all HP platforms ?

Platform Specific -- Windows

• Does the Oracle Cluster File System (OCFS) support network access through NFS or Windows Network Shares?
• Why should I use RAC One Node instead of Oracle Fail Safe on Windows?
• When running Oracle RAC on Windows 2003, what is the recommended OS level?
• Can I run my Oracle 9i RAC and Oracle RAC 10g on the same Windows cluster?
• When using MS VSS on Windows with Oracle RAC, do I need to run the VSS on each node where I have an Oracle RAC instance?
• What do I do when I get an ORA-01031 error logging into the ASM instance?
• The OracleCRService does not start with my windows Oracle RAC implementation, what do I do?
• How do I verify that Host Bus Adapter Node Local Caching has been disabled for the disks I will be using in my RAC cluster?
• My customer has a failsafe cluster installed, what are the benefits of moving their system to RAC?
• My customer wants to understand what type of disk caching they can use with their Windows RAC Cluster, the install guide tells them to disable disk caching?

Platform Specific -- IBM AIX

• Is VIO supported with RAC on IBM AIX?
• Is HACMP needed for RAC on AIX 5.2 using GPFS file system?
• Do I need HACMP/GPFS to store my OCR/Voting file on a shared device.

Platform Specific -- IBM-z/OS (Mainframe)

• Can I run Oracle RAC 10g on my IBM Mainframe Sysplex environment (z/OS)?

Other Applications & RAC

• Can I use Oracle Clusterware for failover of the SAP Enqueue and VIP services when running SAP in a RAC environment?
• Are Oracle Applications certified with RAC?

Diagnosibility

• What are the cdmp directories in the background_dump_dest used for?
• How do I gather all relevant Oracle and OS log/trace files in an Oracle RAC cluster to provide to Support?

EBusiness Suite with RAC

• What is the optimal migration path to be used while migrating the E-Business suite to Oracle RAC?
• Is the Oracle E-Business Suite (Oracle Applications) certified against RAC?
• Can I use TAF with e-Business in a RAC environment?
• How to configure concurrent manager in a RAC environment?
• Should functional partitioning be used with Oracle Applications?
• Which e-Business version is prefereable?
• Can I use Automatic Undo Management with Oracle Applications?
• Is Server Side Load Balancing supported/recommended/proven technology in Oracle EBusiness Suite?

Clustered File Systems

• What are the maximum number of nodes under OCFS on Linux ?
• What files can I put on Linux OCFS?
• Where can I find documentation on OCFS ?
• What are the Best Practices for using a clustered file system with Oracle RAC?
  Can I use a cluster file system for OCR, Voting Disk, Binaries as well as database files?
• Can I use OCFS with SE Oracle RAC?
• Is Sun QFS supported with Oracle RAC? What about Sun GFS?
• Is Red Hat GFS(Global File System) is certified by Oracle for use with Oracle Real Application Clusters?
• Is Linux OCFS2 (OCFS version 2) supported with Oracle RAC?
• What is the maximum number of nodes I can have in my cluster if I am using OCFS2?

Oracle Clusterware

• Do I need to have user equivalence (ssh, etc...) set up after GRID/RAC is already installed?
• With GNS, do ALL public addresses have to be DHCP managed (public IP, public VIP, public SCAN VIP)?
• How is the Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR) stored when I use ASM?
• When does the Oracle node VIP fail over to another node and subsequently return to its home node?
• How do I protect the OCR and Voting in case of media failure?
• How do I use multiple network interfaces to provide High Availability and/or Load Balancing for my interconnect with Oracle Clusterware?
• Can the Network Interface Card (NIC) device names be different on the nodes in a cluster, for both public and private?
• Can I run a 10.1.0.x database with Oracle Clusterware 10.2 ?
• What do I do, I have a corrupt OCR and no valid backup?
• Is it supported to rerun root.sh from the Oracle Clusterware installation ?
• When ct run the command 'onsctl start' receives the message "Unable to open libhasgen10.so". Any idea why the message "unable to open libhasgen10.so" ?
• Voting Files stored in ASM - How many disks per disk group do I need?
• OCR stored in ASM - What happens, if my ASM instance fails on a node?
• Is it possible to use ASM for the OCR and voting disk?
• I am trying to move my voting disks from one diskgroup to another and getting the error "crsctl replace votedisk – not permitted between ASM Disk Groups." Why?
• Can I run the fixup script generated by the 11.2 OUI or CVU on a running system?
• What should the permissions be set to for the voting disk and ocr when doing an Oracle RAC Install?
• How to move the OCR location ?
• With Oracle Clusterware 10g, how do you backup the OCR?
• I am trying to install Oracle Clusterware (10.2) and when I run the OUI, at the Specify Cluster Configuration screen, the Add, Edit and Remove buttons are grayed out. Nothing comes up in the cluster nodes either. Why?
• What happens if I lose my voting disk(s)?
• I am installing Oracle Clusterware with a 3rd party vendor clusterware however in the "Specify Cluster Configuration Page" , Oracle Clusterware installer doesn't show the existing nodes. Why?
• I made a mistake when I created the VIP during the install of Oracle Clusterware, can I change the VIP?
• How should I test the failure of the public network (IE Oracle VIP failover) in my Oracle RAC environment?
• What is the voting disk used for?
• Can I configure a firewall (iptables) on the cluster interconnect?
• Can I change the public hostname in my Oracle Database 10g Cluster using Oracle Clusterware?
• Does the hostname have to match the public name or can it be anything else?
• I have a 2-node RAC running. I notice that it is always node2 that is evicted when I test private network failure scenario by disconnecting the private network cable. Doesn't matter whether it is node1's or node2's private network cable that is disconnected, it is always the node2 that is evicted. What happens in a 3-nodes RAC cluster if node1's cable is disconnected?
• Can I use Oracle Clusterware to provide cold failover of my single instance Oracle Databases?
• What are the licensing rules for Oracle Clusterware? Can I run it without RAC?
• In the course of failure testing in an extended RAC environment we find entries in the cssd logfile which indicate actions like 'diskShortTimeout set to (value)' and 'diskLongTimeout set to (value)'.
  Can anyone please explain the meaning of these two timeouts in addition to disktimeout?
• During Oracle Clusterware installation, I am asked to define a private node name, and then on the next screen asked to define which interfaces should be used as private and public interfaces. What information is required to answer these questions?
• Can I change the name of my cluster after I have created it when I am using Oracle Clusterware?
• Which processes access the OCR ?
• Why does Oracle Clusterware use an additional 'heartbeat' via the voting disk, when other cluster software products do not?
• Why does Oracle still use the voting disks when other cluster sofware is present?
• Customer is hitting bug 4462367 with an error message saying low open file descriptor, how do I work around this until the fix is released with the Oracle Clusterware Bundle for 10.2.0.3 or 10.2.0.4 is released?
• How do I identify the voting file location ?
• How much I/O activity should the voting disk have?
• Does Oracle Clusterware have to be the same or higher release than all instances running on the cluster?
• Can I use Oracle Clusterware to monitor my EM Agent?
• My customer has noticed tons of log files generated under $CRS_HOME/log//client, is there any way automated way we can setup through Oralce Clusterware to prevent/minimize/remove those aggressively generated files?
• What are the IP requirements for the private interconnect?
• Can I set up failover of the VIP to another card in the same machine or what do I do if I have different network interfaces on different nodes in my cluster (I.E. eth0 on node1,2 and eth1 on node 3,4)?
• How to Restore a Lost Voting Disk used by Oracle Clusterware 10g
• How can I register the listener with Oracle Clusterware in RAC 10g Release 2?
• How is the voting disk used by Oracle Clusterware?
• Does Oracle Clusterware support application vips?
• Why is the home for Oracle Clusterware not recommended to be subdirectory of the Oracle base directory?
• How do I put my application under the control of Oracle Clusterware to achieve higher availability?
• Is it supported to allow 3rd Party Clusterware to manage Oracle resources (instances, listeners, etc) and turn off Oracle Clusterware management of these?
• What is the High Availability API?
• Is it a requirement to have the public interface linked to ETH0 or does it only need to be on a ETH lower than the private interface?: - public on ETH1 - private on ETH2
• How do I restore OCR from a backup? On Windows, can I use ocopy?

Streched/Extended RAC -- No Sub Category

• Can a customer use SE RAC to implement an "Extended RAC Cluster" ?
• What is the maximum distance between nodes in an extended RAC environment?
• What are the network requirements for an extended RAC cluster?
• Can I use ASM as mechanism to mirror the data in an Extended RAC cluster?
• How should voting disks be implemented in an extended cluster environment? Can I use standard NFS for the third site voting disk?
• Can I use ASM to mirror Oracle data in an extended RAC environment?

Cluster Verification Utility (CVU) -- No Sub Category

• Where can I find the CVU trace files?
• Why is validateUserEquiv failing during install (or cluvfy run)?
• How do I turn on tracing?
• Can I check if the storage is shared among the nodes?
• When I run 10.2 CLUVFY on a system where RAC 10g Release 1 is running I get following output:
  
  Package existence check failed for "SUNWscucm:3.1".
  Package existence check failed for "SUNWudlmr:3.1".
  Package existence check failed for "SUNWudlm:3.1".
  Package existence check failed for "ORCLudlm:Dev_Release_06/11/04,_64bit_3.3.4.8_reentrant".
  Package existence check failed for "SUNWscr:3.1".
  Package existence check failed for "SUNWscu:3.1".
  Checking this Solaris system I don't see those packages installed. Can I continue my install?
• What are the default values for the command line arguments?
• How do I check the Oracle Clusterware stack and other sub-components of it?
• Is there a way to verify that the Oracle Clusterware is working properly before proceeding with RAC install?
• At what point cluvfy is usable? Can I use cluvfy before installing Oracle Clusterware?
• What is CVU? What are its objectives and features?
• What is a stage?
• What is a component?
• What is nodelist?
• Do I have to be root to use CVU?
• What about discovery? Does CVU discover installed components?
• How do I report a(or tons of) bug?
• What are the requirements for CVU?
• What is 'cvuqdisk' rpm? Why should I install this rpm?
• How do I install 'cvuqdisk' package?
• How do I know about cluvfy commands? The usage text of cluvfy does not show individual commands.
• Do I h