backup Oracle9i RAC

Hi,

I'm wondering how the backup of an Oracle 9i RAC should be conifgured.

My environment is the following:

Oracle 9i RAC running on 2 Windows 2003 servers
Oracle Cluster file system
The instances on both RAC nodes are: INST1 and INST2. The instance name of the RAC is INST.
Data Protector 5.1 as backup solution.

The online backup of the instance INST is working fine. The online backup was configured for the instance INST1 on the node NODE1. An RMAN backup of the instance INST1 is indeed taking the backup of the complete Oracle RAC INST instance (data files and archive log files from the instances INST1 and INST2).

But how do you schedule the backup of the Oracle RAC so that the backup itself is cluster-aware?

In a normal Oracle cluster setup, you take the online backup of the Oracle database running on the MC/SG package or the Microsoft Virtual Server. The backup is taken independent of on which node the database is actually running.

If you schedule the backup of the RAC instance INST through the backup of the instance INST1 running on NODE1, there won't be a backup if the NODE1 is down. But the RAC is turning on NODE2 at that time and thus the backup should be taken there. Has the Oracle RAC a virtual name as well that can be used for the backups?

best regards,

Kurt