Windows RAC and Lesssons Learned

Want to know how-to break an Oracle RAC on Windows installation?

I recently completed an implementation of 10gR2 on Windows and found two new ways to kill a RAC install.

#1 Windows allows you to customize the name of your network interface. So, my administrator named one of the interfaces "10.3". This was a good idea on the surface, but VIPCA didn't like it in the least. When attempting to run VIPCA it generated a trace file saying "Interface 10, Subnet 3" was an invalid number. It looks like the parse routine reading the interface definitions looks for a pattern of number"."number to begin parsing the interface definition.

#2 My administrator did me a favor, I wanted to bond a pair of interfaces on the computer (more speed, improved fault tolerance) . This happened overnight, and he rebooted the nodes after completing the work. When I came in the next morning, the RAC environment was up with no apparent errors on the local nodes. The problem was that no other computer would speak to the cluster managed services. ORA-12516 no suitable protocol for service. The maintenance on the network had changed the order of the interfaces in windows. Once I reset the interfaces to the correct order (Public, Private, etc...) rebooted and everything worked.

Use 11g features for a 9i to 10g upgrade!

It's 10:50PM, and you know that all us night owls are coming to life.

I just finished reviewing the Oracle white papers on Real Application Testing for 9i and 10g databases this is great technology. If you are looking to migrate your existing systems to 11g and Real Application Testing is in the budget, this is a great value proposition to sweeten the deal.

Here's the scoop: If you have an existing 11g database installation, you can use "opatch" to retrofit the workload capture functionality of the 11g Real Application Testing to an existing 9i or 10g database. After the patch is applied and the capture process enabled, it is a simple process to "replay" those transactions inside the 11g environment.

Oracle put together a great white paper (all 48 pages) on how this technology can be applied to an 9i to 10g migration. It looks like all us procrastinators who dreaded the regression testing in our future just got a lifeline.