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.