ORA-01503: CREATE CONTROLFILE failed on RMAN duplicate between RAC databases

It was while since I performed an RMAN duplicate from a RAC database to another RAC database. You may find this post useless as there’s a lot of information out there about the error I faced, but all my posts are kind of my own little diary.

So, basically. In order to successfully duplicate one database to another you may need this.

    - TNS setup on the server where the database to be duplicated is hosted. You need to be able to tnsping both, the target and the auxiliary database.

     - Create a parameter file and password file for the auxiliary and startup nomount the first instance.

    - Create a full backup of the target database including archivelogs.

    - Connect to rman to both the target and the auxiliary databases from the auxiliary server:

rman target sys/*****@<target_db> auxiliary /

    - Issue the duplicate command:

 duplicate target database to <auxiliary_db>;

This should successfully finish but I got this error:

RMAN-00571: ===========================================================

RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============

RMAN-00571: ===========================================================

RMAN-03002: failure of Duplicate Db command at 01/03/2017 18:29:58

RMAN-05501: aborting duplication of target database

RMAN-06136: ORACLE error from auxiliary database: ORA-01503: CREATE CONTROLFILE failed

ORA-12720: operation requires database is in EXCLUSIVE mode

I searched this and the culprit is that my parameter file for the auxiliary had this:

cluster_database = true

By MOS note “Rman duplicate fail with RMAN-06136, ORA-01503, ORA-12720, ORA-00494 enqueue [CF] (Doc ID 1335479.1)”. Duplicate from a RAC database to another RAC database is not supported, hence we need to modify the parameter cluster_database to false in the auxiliary database.

After doing this the duplicate finished correctly.

Thanks,

Alfredo