Concept behind IPMP confiugration for RAC's Public & Interconnect, Solaris

For our coming "going to born" baby Oracle 11g RAC on Solaris 10, i wrote a step by step pre installation task guide, that i am going to release pretty soon, though i mentioned on that guide about configuration of IPMP, i was expecting that our system admins will be able to do by themselves but unfortunately it was just new for them, so i have to make more research to discuss the exact IPMP concept and configuration with them. Here are my finding

Consider you have 4 Network cards in your machine i.e.

1. c0 ---> Public IP Interface
2. c1 ---> Public IP Interface (standby)
3. c2 ---> Private Interconnect IP Interface
4. c3 ---> Private Interconnect IP Interface (standby)

so consider if you have subnet (172.168.1.0) for Public Interface and (10.2.1.0) as private interconnect subnet, i am not considering netmask and other IP/Network configuration in my example, but you should keep in mind that all Public IP's for RAC network configuration should be in single/same Subnet, while all Interconnect IP's should also be in single/same subnet.

So now 1st to configure Public Interface you need three/3 IPs e.g.

172.168.1.1, 172.168.1.2 & 172.168.1.3

so you will assign them like:

1. c0 ---> will be assign 172.168.1.1 --- called Physical IP
2. c0:1 ---> will be assign 172.168.1.2 --- called Test IP
3. c1 ---> will be assign 172.168.1.3 --- called Test IP

all three should be in same/single IPMP group.

for private interconnect, you need also three IPs e.g.

10.2.1.1, 10.2.1.2 & 10.2.1.3

1. c2 ---> will be assign 10.2.1.1 --- called Physical IP
2. c2:1 ---> will be assign 10.2.1.2 --- called Test IP
3. c3 ---> will be assign 10.2.1.3 --- called Test IP

all three should be in same/single IPMP group other then Public IPMP group. You should NOT keep Public & Interconnect IPMP group names similar, otherwise it can cause serious network problems and even ORACLE discourage doing this.

References:

1. Metalink Note: 283107.1
2. Metalink Note: 368464.1

Cheers