Getting Started Guide

Preparing Shared Storage 19

Preparing Shared Storage for

Oracle RAC Installation

NOTE: In this section, the terms disk(s), volume(s), virtual disk(s), LUN(s) mean the

same and are used interchangeably, unless specified otherwise. Similarly, the

terms Stripe Element Size and Segment Size both can be used interchangeably.

Oracle RAC requires shared LUNs for storing your Oracle Cluster Registry

(OCR), voting disks, Oracle Home using ACFS, Oracle Database files, and

Flash Recovery Area (FRA). To ensure high availability for Oracle RAC it is

recommended that you have:

• Three shared LUNs, each of 1 GB in size for normal redundancy or five

LUNs for high redundancy for the Oracle clusterware.

• At least two shared disks to store your database. Each shared disk should

be the same disk speed and size.

• At least two shared LUNs to store your Automatic Storage Management

Cluster File System (ACFS). Each shared disk must be at least 10 GB, for a

total size of 20 GB.

• At least two shared LUNs or volumes to store your FRA. Ideally, the FRA

space should be large enough to copy all of your Oracle datafiles and

incremental backups. For more information on optimally sizing your FRA,

see My Oracle Support ID 305648.1 section "What should be the size of

Flash Recovery Area?"

NOTE: It is recommended to use the device mapper multipath for optimal

performance and persistent name binding across nodes within the cluster.

NOTE: For more information on attaching shared LUNs/volumes, see the Wiki

documentation found at: http:// en.community.dell.com/dell-

groups/enterprise_solutions/w/oracle_solutions/3-storage.aspx

Partitioning the Shared Disk

This section describes how to use Linux’s native partition utility fdisk to

create and align a single partition on a volume/virtual disk that spans the

entire disk.

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