I  recently came across an issue in a 2 node RAC, Oracle 11gR2 environment for one of our Virtual-DBA clients.  The client dba had created a new spfile and placed it in ASM for node 1 and then tried to restart the instance using srvctl.  The instance would not restart and was giving the following error

CRS-0215: Could not start resource 'ora.PROD.PROD1.inst’. 

I was able to log into sqlplus and mount the instance without any issues.  This led me to believe that the configuration file in the OCR was not correct. I shut down the instance and ran the command

srvctl config database –d prod –a. 

This showed that the value for the spfile was null.  The configuration file needed to be updated with the new location of the spfile in ASM.  Running the command srvctl

modify database –d prod –p ‘+DATA/PROD/spfilePROD.ora’

updated the configuration file with the new spfile location.  Tried to start the instance again and this time it failed with the following error,

servername:ora.PROD.PROD1.inst:ORA-01105: mount is incompatible with mounts by other instances. 

This error comes up when the db_recovery_file_dest or the db_recovery_file_dest_size parameters are different between the nodes.  I checked the value for both node1 and node2 and value for db_recovery_file_dest_size was different between the nodes, node1 was set to 25g and node2 was set to 40g.  I changed value for node1 to match node2 using,

alter system set db_recovery_file_dest_size=40G scope=both;

After these two changes the instance came back up without any issues.

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