RMAN Active Duplicate on RAC fails with ORA-17629 and ORA-17627: ORA-12154 (Doc ID 1982003.1)

RMAN active duplication of RAC database fails on restart operation with the following error messages:

RMAN-03002: failure of Duplicate Db command at 02/17/2015 15:12:11
RMAN-05501: aborting duplication of target database
RMAN-03015: error occurred in stored script Memory Script
RMAN-03009: failure of backup command on t0 channel at 02/17/2015 15:11:48
ORA-17629: Cannot connect to the remote database server
ORA-17627: ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve the connect identifier specified
ORA-17629: Cannot connect to the remote database server
 

CAUSE

ORA-12154 is raised whenever the TNS alias is not found on tnsnames.ora

After verification of tnsanames.ora files from both installations on Target and Auxiliary we see all the proper entries are there

Still the RMAN duplicate command fails on ORA-12154

The reason for ORA-12154 being raised is because the process is looking for tnsnames.ora in a different ORACLE_HOME on the Auxiliary side.   This different ORACLE_HOME on Auxiliary side is usually the GRID HOME.  
 
On 11G RAC Customers can configure SCAN Listener to handle failover connections on DB and ASM instances.

When RMAN duplicate is executed it needs to shutdown/startup the database several times.  Once the DB is down, a TNS connection can get lost on next startup since the corresponding service associated with the instance is no longer available.  The connection from RMAN thus fails when looking for the tnsnames.ora file under the wrong home.
 

SOLUTION

There are two ways to workaround this problem

1) Copy the tnsnames.ora file form the RDBMS Home to the GRID Home

2) Establish a direct connection instead of using a TNS alias.  For example:

RMAN> connect auxiliary sys/@(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=)(PORT=1521))(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVER=DEDICATED)(SERVICE_NAME=)(UR=A)))

NOTE:  There should be no spaces within connect string.