Oracle10g ASM configuration

Oracle10g has a new feature called ASM (Automated Storage Management). This is by far the most talked about feature in 10g. ASM is the next logical step beyond OMF (Oracle Managed Files) and allows the DBA to move beyond storage management and focus on managing the database.

The following hint is helpful because it fills in a gap in the ASM docs. The Oracle documentation mentions use of a ASM drivers, which seem to be a dead end. ASM drivers are only available on certain releases of Linux and Solaris. Raw file systems have a limit as to how many are available. If you are just test driving 10g and ASM using raw devices are a great way to go until these drivers become more stable.

Oracle seemed to have weak documentation about what an init.ora looks like between the ASM database and a database that actually creates dbfs on ASM disk groups. The init.ora's presented walk you through the creation of an ASM database and the 2-n databases that actually create dbf's in that space.

First things first, the ASM drivers were a dead end for me. I started with Suse 9.0 and found that Oracle will only support enterprise versions of RedHat and UL. I converted my server to RedHat ES 3.0 to find that the ASM drivers are not included for ES 3.0 after some effort I was able to get the drivers running but I could not get my ASM instance to use the devices. I found that the only way to configure ASM was using raw devices not ASM marked partitions!

The ASM init.ora looks like this...

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INSTANCE_TYPE=ASM

ASM_DISKGROUPS ='dgroup1'

ASM_DISKSTRING ='/dev/raw/*'

shared_pool_size=64000000

The second instance that uses ASM called ASMDB has a init.ora that looks like this... 

INSTANCE_TYPE = RDBMS

DB_CREATE_FILE_DEST = '+dgroup1'

control_files='/u01/apps/oracle/admin/ASMDB/asmdb1.ctl'

db_name=ASMDB

###########################################

# System Managed Undo and Rollback Segments

###########################################

undo_management=AUTO

undo_retention=900

 

java_pool_size=100

large_pool_size=83886080

shared_pool_size=83886080

job_queue_processes=1

processes=50

 

remote_login_passwordfile=exclusive

I was not able to get control files to live in ASM controlled space after a restart of the ASMDB instance. So you will note that my control file lives on a file system. The database create command then became "create database ASMDB;".

This was first published in August 2004

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