Describe how Grid Plug and Play affects Clusterware

In Oracle® Clusterware Administration and Deployment Guide 11g Release 2 (11.2), the chapter, What's New in Oracle Clusterware Administration and Deployment?, says that:

Grid Plug and Play enables you to move your data center toward a dynamic grid infrastructure. This enables you to consolidate applications and lower the costs of managing applications, while providing a highly available environment that can easily scale when the workload requires. There are many modifications in Oracle RAC 11g release 2 (11.2) to support the easy addition of servers in a cluster and therefore a more dynamic grid.

In the past, adding or removing servers in a cluster required extensive manual preparation. With this release, Grid Plug and Play reduces the costs of installing, configuring, and managing server nodes by automating the following tasks:

    • Adding an Oracle RAC database instance
    • Negotiating appropriate network identities for itself
    • Acquiring additional information it needs to operate from a configuration profile
    • Configuring or reconfiguring itself using profile data, making host names and addresses resolvable on the network

Additionally, the number of steps necessary to add and remove nodes is reduced.

Oracle Enterprise Manager immediately reflects Grid Plug and Play-enabled changes.

The section, Oracle High Availability Services Stack, says that:

    • Grid Plug and Play (GPNPD): GPNPD provides access to the Grid Plug and Play profile, and coordinates updates to the profile among the nodes of the cluster to ensure that all of the nodes node have the most recent profile.
    • …
    • Multicast Domain Name Service (mDNS): Grid Plug and Play uses the mDNS process to locate profiles in the cluster, as well as by GNS to perform name resolution. The mDNS process is a background process on Linux and UNIX, and a service on Windows.

The section, About Private Networks, Network Interfaces, and Network Adapters, says that the entity, Private network interfaces, is stored in the Oracle Clusterware, in the Grid Plug and Play (GPnP) Profile. The comment is:

Configure an interface for use as a private interface during installation by marking the interface as Private, or use the oifcfg cluster_interconnects command to designate an interface as a private interface.