Hi Shockneck,

many many thanks for your reply. You have answered all my questions so far.
- DBAs don't have root access to the cluster
- only 2 SAs will have root access - me and my backup - and we will both build the cluster together
- we have a very strong change control in place and our documentation is pretty good
- we are aware this is no 24/7/365 solution - that is why we have an independant DR recovery site and a uat environment for testing
- the A1-A5 servers + 1 spare are running right now in a VCS cluster on AIX ... our engineering doesnt support it past 9/2010 - that is basically why we're going to move it to hacmp
- we will have almost a year for build and testing
- we have a weekend greenzone of 36 hrs for the environment and always patch all nodes in any cluster at the same time
- we will have hartbeat on disk on at least 2 different mini-devicegroups as you suggested

Once more thank you for all your suggestions - I will keep you in the loop if problems arise as I can see you don't have any major objection

Thank you in addition for the EMC bug tip - this explains why we have the problems on the 2 node clusters ... our SAN engineering is probably aware but has not yet certified the fix - I will ask them on monday for the fix.

Kind regards
zxmaus