Is it possible to run a mixed Red Hat O/S version Oracle RAC Cluster

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I have a client who is currently running a 4 node Oracle RAC Database cluster. They want to add new hardware for 2 new nodes. The current nodes are running Red Hat 4.4 Oracle RAC and Database software for Oracle 10g R2 patched up to date.

The new hardware will only run with drivers from Red Hat 4.8 or above. I would like to start the new nodes at Red Hat 5.5 and slowly move the older nodes to Red Hat 5.5 one at a time. My DBA’s can’t come up with a real answer about a mixed O/S version cluster and I do NOT really trust Oracle.

The current kernel version on the current nodes is
Linux 2.6.9-42.0.2.ELsmp #1 SMP Thu Aug 17 17:57:31 EDT 2006 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

and the OCFS2 version is
[root@HHPCSIB3 ~]# rpm -qa | grep ocfs2
ocfs2console-1.2.7-1.el4
ocfs2-tools-1.2.7-1.el4
ocfs2-2.6.9-42.0.2.ELsmp-1.2.9-1.el4

The new kernel would be
Linux 2.6.18-194.el5 #1 SMP Tue Mar 16 21:52:43 EDT 2010 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

and the OCFS2 version would be
ocfs2-2.6.18-194.el5-1.4.7-1.el5
ocfs2-tools-1.4.4-1.el5
ocfs2console-1.4.4-1.el5

The only odd-ballness I can see in this, as all the Oracle software would be the same, is that I will have to install a version of OCFS2 that matches the kernel version, of course the O/S version will be different but I have installed and have running Oracle 10g R2 from the same install package running on both Red Hat 4 and 5 in cluster and stand alone.

I will be happy to provide any more information needed. And Thank you for any suggestions or help.

Answer

Personally I don’t like this idea. Whenever I’m making a major change to my farm/cluster/whatever, I like to build a new one, test it, then grow it by migrating machines and jobs from the old one as I retire things.

I think your Oracle cluster will probably be happy running RH 5.x, but depending on what your load depends on, different nodes running different OS base versions may behave differently.

Of course you mentioned “Oracle”… so I suspect that licensing considerations may prevent you from doing this. I’ve never worked with Oracle so I have no idea how flexible they are in these circumstances.

Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Community , Answer Author : David Mackintosh

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