10gR2 Silent Install with 11gr2 CRS fails

I was trying to perform a 10.2 silent install with 11gR2 CRS. While doing pre-checks installer failed with following error

Check complete: Failed <<<<
Problem: The 'active' version of Oracle Clusterware is not 10g Release 2 (10.2).
Recommendation: You must upgrade all nodes of the cluster to Oracle Clusterware 10g Release 2.  If you have upgraded some but not all of the nodes to use the 10g Release 2 version of Oracle Clusterware, then the 'active' version is still 10g Release 1 (10.1)  You must upgrade all nodes in the cluster to Oracle Clusterware 10g Release 2 before installing Oracle 10g Release 2 Real Application Clusters.

I tried “ignoreSysPrereqs” option with runInstaller but it also did not succeed. I checked My Oracle Support (formerly metalink..anyways I still refer to as metalink) and also searched for any known issues, but couldn’t find any document. I could find some issues on OTN but there was no solution. Finally I searched for the file reporting this error in Oracle software staging location.

$% grep -r "version of Oracle Clusterware is not 10g Release 2" *
stage/prereq/db/db_prereq.xml:

This was part of following code( I have removed Angle brackets with Square brackets as wordpress confuses it with html tags)

[PREREQUISITE NAME="Detect10.2CRS"
                EXTERNALNAME="Checking Oracle Clusterware version ..."
                EXTERNALNAMEID="[email protected]"
                SEVERITY="Error"]
        [DESCRIPTION TEXT="This is a prerequisite condition to test if all nodes in the cluster have had the Clusterware upgraded to 10g Release 2 (10.2)."
                TEXTID="S_CHECK_10.2_CRS_DESCRIPTION@oracle.install.prereqs.resources.PrereqRes"/]
        [RULESETREF NAME="CRS102Checks" RULE="CheckFor102CRS" FILE="db/refhost.xml"
                RESULTS_FILE="install_rule_results.xml"/]
        [PROBLEM TEXT="The 'active' version of Oracle Clusterware is not 10g Release 2 (10.2)."
                TEXTID="S_CHECK_10.2_CRS_ERROR@oracle.install.prereqs.resources.PrereqRes"]
        [/PROBLEM]

Checking “Detect10.2CRS” in My Oracle Support, got exact hit

Silent Install 10.2.0.1 Database Fails When Cluster Is 11.1.0.6 [ID 755345.1]

As per note, we need to change the following lines in (software location)\stage\prereq\db\db_prereq.xml file ( I have removed Angle brackets with Square brackets as wordpress confuses it with html tags)

[PREREQUISITESET NAME="clusterTests"]
[PREREQUISITEREF NAME="Detect10.2CRS" SEVERITY="Error"/]
[/PREREQUISITESET]

to :

[PREREQUISITESET NAME="clusterTests"]
[/PREREQUISITESET]

You would be required to do same change for similar file to any 10g patchset on top of it. In case of 10.2.0.4 patch I found it under (software_location)/stage/prereq/patch_prereqs.xml
Searching on the error messages in My Oracle Support did not return above document. Anyways documenting it so that Search engines can report it faster. Note that to use 10g DB software with 11gR2 CRS, you will have to pin the nodes

$GRID_HOME/bin/crsctl pin css -n node1 node2

olsnodes -t will report current status of the nodes i.e whether pinned or not

Tags: 10gCRSInstall