This issue affects rolling upgrade from Oracle Grid Infrastructure 12c Release 1 (12.1) to Oracle Grid Infrastructure 18c Release 1 (18.1) of Oracle Clusterware standard Cluster with Oracle ASM. A node running Oracle Grid Infrastructure 12c Release 1 (12.1) cannot join the cluster after the first node has been upgraded to Oracle Grid Infrastructure 18c Release 1 (18.1).

The nodes running Oracle Grid Infrastructure 12c Release 1 (12.1) that are in ONLINE status continue to be members of the cluster.

Workaround:

Upgrade Oracle Grid Infrastructure from 12c Release 1 (12.1) to 18c Release 1 (18.1) on the failed node.

Sometimes starting an Oracle Grid Infrastructure stack fails with the following error stack when there are reader farm services on a pluggable database (PDB):

CRS-5017: The resource action "<rfservice on pdb> start" encountered the following error:

ORA-12963: A read-only instance cannot be the first instance to open a database

Workaround:

Ensure that PDB is started on a Hub Node and then restart the service reported as part of the CRS-5017 error message.

While upgrading Oracle Grid Infrastructure 12c Release 2 (12.2), the Grid Infrastructure Management Repository (GIMR) configuration tool could fail with the following error:

MGTUA-1801 : Prerequisite check for GIMR database upgrade operation failed

Workaround:

As the Oracle Grid Infrastructure owner, create the <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/_mgmtdb/adump/ directory on the server and try executing the configuration tool again.