There are a lot of explanation and different solutions for the error “ORA-00304: requested INSTANCE_NUMBER is busy”. But today, in my case while I was tyring to shutdown one of the cluster nodes, it hanged. There were no more information related with the hang in the log and trace files, so I went with shut abort and startup and got the following message:
SQL> startup
ORA-00304: requested INSTANCE_NUMBER is busy
SQL>
The second node of the RAC database was up and running. And the instance_number was set to 2. After a little investigation, I found out that there was one process related with the database running on OS (even the database was closed) I killed that session and started the first node and it opened successfully