Re: Is this some kind of cluster?

John, is it two boxes or one? You could be looking a hardware cluster set up for failover.

Or like you suspect it is actually one machine with two different host names and each virtual host (partition ?) having its own network card. But I do not beleive you could access Oracle from both boxes at one time without RAC to coordinate the block updates.

If you shut Oracle down on one side does it disappear from the other. If so then it would appear that it is really just one and the same database.

Interesting setup. We run RAC on non-Sun hardware so I have never seen anything quite like you have described.

• Mark D Powell --