Does it matter where the binaries are?

We have a collection of systems proposed where a set (I'm delibaerately avoiding the word 'cluster' here as we're not talking RAC) of Sun V440 boxes will be running Oracle instances attached to a NetApp 920c filer cluster providing storage. Each server will be running one live production database and one hot standby (dataguard) of one of the database for which the live database is on one of the other servers.

The datafiles for each database will be on the filer, each database will be uniquely named to ensure no name clashes.

It has been suggested that we put the Oracle binaries on the filer so when we patch one server we're patching them all. From discussions so far it sounds like $ORACLE_BASE will point to a location on the server but $ORACLE_HOME will point to a location on the filer (alert logs, tnanames &c will be on the server storage, datafiles and binaries will be on the filer).

Obviously we'll have to make sure trhat the Oracle user UID numbers are the same accross all servers (but we have to do that anyway regfardless of where the binaries live) and will have to ensure that the correct permissions are set and the files in /usr/local/bin and /var/opt/oracle are created (presumably riunnign the root.sh and orainstRoot.sh scripts created when we do the first install will accomplish this).

Could someone please tell me. Has anyone done this (seems a pretty obvious thing to try)? Did it work? Is there anything we need to watch out for (have I missed anything)? Is anyone aware of any documentation on how to do this?

Thanks

Stephen

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