Oracle Database Tips by Donald Burleson

Oracle10g Grid Computing with RAC
Chapter 15 - RAC Migration Topics

Configuring Virtual IPs For 10g RAC

In order to verify that each node meets the network requirements, you should follow these steps:

1. Verify the presence of, or install, the NICs (a minimum of 2) for the public and private networks and configure them with either public or private IP addresses.
    

2. Use your OS utilities to register the host names and IP addresses for the public network interfaces in DNS.
    

3. For each node in the cluster, register the virtual host name and IP address in DNS.
    

4. Edit the /etc/hosts file (on UNIX or Linux) and add the private, public, and virtual interfaces. 

Let's look at an example on a two-node Linux system:

      [aultlinux1]/etc> more /etc/hosts
      # Do not remove the following line, or various programs
      # that require network functionality will fail.
      138.1.137.45    aultlinux1.acme.com   aultlinux1
      138.1.137.46    aultlinux2.acme.com   aultlinux2
      192.168.0.10    int-aultlinux1.acme.com       int-aultlinux1
      192.168.0.20    int-aultlinux2.acme.com       int-aultlinux2
      138.1.137.25    aultlinux1-v.acme.com aultlinux1-v
      138.1.137.26    aultlinux2-v.acme.com aultlinux2-v
      127.0.0.1       aultlinux1 localhost.localdomain   localhost

In this example, the int-* addresses are private and the *-v addresses are for the virtual IP's.

To identify the interface name and associated IP address for every network adapter, enter the following command: 

      # /sbin/ifconfig -a
   ...or /usr/bin/netstat -in on HP-UX
    ...or ipconfig on Windows

Notice that you don't have to add the virtual IP's to ifconfig, this is because the VIPCA (Virtual IP Configuration Assistant) does this for you.

At this point, if everything is properly configured, you should be able to ping the public IP names from any of the machines on the network, for example:

[aultlinux2]/home/oracle>ping aultlinux1
      Pinging aultlinux1.acme.com [138.1.137.45] with 32 bytes
      Reply from 138.1.137.45: bytes=32 time<10ms TTL=255
      Reply from 138.1.137.45: bytes=32 time<10ms TTL=255

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