Just received this question from a colleague these days:
“The current customer environment is 10.2.0.5 on Linux with a 2 node RAC cluster having OCR and Voting Disks on RAW devices. Customer is concerned about the possibility of upgrading to 11gR2 Grid infrastructure first before they could upgrade to 12c Grid
infrastructure.”
Now the answer is written down in MOS Note 1572925.1:
How to Upgrade to 12c Grid Infrastructure if OCR or Voting File is on Raw/Block Devices
Basically the MOS Note says:
You will have to relocate your OCR/Voting to a supported device BEFORE you can upgrade to Oracle Grid Infrastructure 12c. No way out. A bit more clarification (thanks to Markus Michalewicz):
The assumption of the note (which you might want to state) is that the customer has pre-12c GI with OCR / Voting Disk on RAW.
In this case, Option A is always an option.
For Option B, however, you need to distinguish. So the note should say:
- Option B: Customer is on 11g Rel. 2 still using RAW Devices
- Then move the OCR and Voting Disks to ASM
- Option C: Customer is on pre-11g Rel. 2 and does not want to introduce a CFS (bad idea anyways) or use NFS
- Then upgrade to 11g Rel. 2 and move the Clusterware files into ASM as mentioned under Option B.
Unfortunately another example to add to my collection of “What happens if you stay too long on older releases?”. In this case it simply increases complexity and drives costs as well. And please no complaints: Oracle Database 10.2 went out of PREMIER SUPPORT in July 2010 – 3.5 years ago!!!
-Mike
