Thursday, October 31, 2019

About RAC SCAN IP

A SCAN (Single Client Access Name) is a special case of VIP. The SCAN should also be defined in DNS, and not assigned to any host or interface. There should be three IPs associated with the SCAN name in DNS, and the DNS entry should be defined so that one of the three IPs is returned each time DNS is queried, in a round robin fashion.

At clusterware startup time, each of the three VIPs that make up the SCAN will be assigned to a different node in the cluster. (Except in the special case of a two node cluster, one of the nodes will have a 2 SCAN VIPs assigned to it.) The point of the SCAN, is that no matter how many nodes are added to or removed from the cluster, all the Net Service Name definitions in your tnsnames.ora (or LDAP equivalent) will not need to ever change, because they all refer to the SCAN, which doesn't change, regardless of how many node additions or drops are made to the cluster.

Additionally, you may have the SCAN defined as: rac-scan with three IPs, 10.1.1.7, 10.1.1.8, 10.1.1.9. Again, the DNS definition would be defined so those IPs are served up in a round robin order.