Creating ASM for test purposes in the file system

First of all, I’m back after pausing for a while – sorry for not updating the blog in the past weeks … and you won’t see many updates in the following weeks as it’ll be holiday season (and we Germans have sooooo many public holidays) 🙂

Anyway, back to tech topics. Today I want to test Oracle Restart upgrades. Oracle Restart internally is called SIHA (Single Instance High Availability) which explains the topic a bit more. Basically it means having your database reside in ASM and let Oracle Clusterware take care on it, even though you don’t have a cluster. Not a bad idea as this can be very helpful in real world environments. But I did realize that the entire process is not documented in all details. So I’d thought I should give this a try.

The first challenge I do face: I have just one disk in my machine – so I’ll have to tweak ASM a bit to make it work with files on the file system.

Creating two empty strawman files in file system with dd is not a big deal:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/oradata/ASM/dg_DATA bs=8192 count=1000000 oflag=direct
1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
8192000000 bytes (8.2 GB) copied, 336.371 seconds, 24.4 MB/s
[V112] oracle@localhost:/oradata
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/oradata/ASM/dg_BCK bs=8192 count=500000 oflag=direct
500000+0 records in
500000+0 records out
4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 246.021 seconds, 16.6 MB/s

But the next step is to start the cssd (Cluster Synchronization Services Demon) in my Oracle Database 10.2.0.5 installation from within the $ORACLE_HOME/bin directory:

[root@localhost bin]# 
localconfig add
/etc/oracle does not exist. Creating it now.
Successfully accumulated necessary OCR keys.
Creating OCR keys for user 'root', privgrp 'root'..
Operation successful.
Configuration for local CSS has been initialized
Adding to inittab
Startup will be queued to init within 30 seconds.
Checking the status of new Oracle init process...
Expecting the CRS daemons to be up within 600 seconds.
CSS is active on these nodes.
localhost
CSS is active on all nodes.
Oracle CSS service is installed and running under init(1M)

Otherwise no chance for ASM to start up.

Now my attempts to use simply DBCA (Database Configuration Assistant) to creare the ASM instance on these two strawman files did not work as the DBCA didn’t want to recognize the “disks”. So back to good old command line. By the way, there’s a MOS Note out there which may be helpful as well (but didn’t work in my case).
How To Create ASM Diskgroups using NFS/NAS Files? (Doc ID
731775.1)

1. Create a password file for ASM instance in $ORACLE_HOME/dbs
2. Create a fresh init.ora for ASM within the same directory having the following parameters set:
   _asm_allow_only_raw_disks=’FALSE’
   asm_diskstring=’/oradata/ASM/dg*’
   asm_power_limit=4
   instance_type=asm
3. With these parameter set I could bring the instance into MOUNT state ready to create the two disk groups after setting the ORACLE_SID=+ASM in the environment:
   SYS:+ASM> create diskgroup DATA external redundancy disk ‘/oradata/ASM/dg_DATA’;
   Diskgroup created.
   SYS:+ASM>  create diskgroup BCK  external redundancy disk ‘/oradata/ASM/dg_BCK’;
   Diskgroup created.

Starting up ASM did work now well after shutting it down first – and a check for SELECT path from V$ASM_DISK did show me my disks.

Next step – simply – is to create a database with DBCA inside of ASM. So the first part of my test did complete.

… to be continued soon …