Alex, Alas your dreams are coming true! The demise of shared Oracle Home! Since Oracle11g supports online patches (on certain platforms), and yes I mean patching the server executable while it is running, you wouldn't want a single Oracle Home. As I point out in my blog (uh, occasionally) no good practitioner would recommend a single ANYTHING. So to me shared home or shared APPL_TOP means a condensing factor. If I have 4 nodes, I'll use 2 homes. Shared Home is still a very good idea, but good ideas applied incorrectly are very bad ideas. I will list some pros and cons - if anyone feels like adding some more - by all means, please do. With shared Oracle home - You are guaranteed to have the same patches on both nodes and use actually the same binaries. - It's supposedly easier to manage (was a disaster in 9i though) especially on large RAC installations (by number of nodes). -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l