HP Serviceguard Enterprise Cluster Master Toolkit User Guide, June 2014

This section discusses the use of the Oracle database server feature called Automatic Storage
Management (ASM) in HP Serviceguard for single database instance failover. SGeRAC supports
ASM with Oracle RAC on both ASM over raw devices and ASM over SLVM. For Oracle
single-instance failover, Serviceguard support is for ASM over LVM where the members of the ASM
disk groups are raw logical volumes managed by LVM. LVM provides the necessary I/O fencing
mechanism and also the multipathing capability not present in HP-UX 11i v2. When using ASM
with Oracle single-instance database versions earlier to 11gR2, the ASM file descriptors are kept
open on ASM disk group members even after the disk groups are dismounted. Oracle has released
patches which address the ASM descriptor issue and meets the Serviceguard requirement for
supporting ASM. Note that these patches are not required for Oracle 11gR2 or later versions. This
whitepaper describes how Oracle failover packages can now use Oracle ASM with the interim
patches provided by Oracle. The framework for ASM integration with Serviceguard makes use of
a Multi-Node Package (MNP) to encapsulate the ASM instance and to have the ASM instance
running on all nodes, with one or more Oracle single-instance failover packages dependent on
this MNP. Customers wishing to use the proposed framework for ASM integration with Serviceguard
must use this whitepaper in conjunction with the Oracle toolkit bundled in the Enterprise Cluster
Master Toolkit (ECMT) scripts, provided by HP.
What is Automatic Storage Management (ASM)?
Automatic Storage Management is a feature provided in Oracle 10g or later to simplify the
database files management. It provides the database administrator with a simple storage
management interface that is consistent across all server and storage platforms. ASM provides file
system and volume management capabilities directly inside the Oracle database kernel, this allows
volumes and disk management with familiar SQL statements in Oracle. This is an alternative to
platform file systems and volume managers for the management of most file types used to store the
Oracle database, including Oracle datafiles, control files, and online and archived redo log files.
File types that are not supported by ASM include Oracle database server binaries, trace files,
audit files, alert logs, backup files, export files, tar files, and core files. ASM cannot manage storage
for application binaries and data. ASM uses disk groups to store datafiles; an ASM disk group is
a collection of disks that ASM manages as a unit. Within a disk group, ASM exposes a file system
interface for Oracle database files. The contents of files that are stored in a disk group are evenly
distributed, or striped to eliminate hot spots and to provide uniform performance across the disks.
This section describes the High Availability Scripts for Oracle ASM support with Serviceguard.
Support is for Automatic Storage Management (ASM) over LVM where the ASM disk group members
are raw logical volumes managed by LVM.
Following are the supported versions of HP Serviceguard:
• A.11.19
• A.11.20
Oracle versions supported with ASM are 10.2.0.4, 11.1.0.6, and 11.1.0.7 with interim patches
7330611 and 7225720 installed. Before these patches were released by Oracle, ASM kept
descriptors open on ASM disk group member volumes even after the ASM disk group was
dismounted. This prevented the deactivation of the LVM volume groups. These two patches address
the ASM descriptor issue and meets the Serviceguard requirement for supporting ASM. Oracle
version 11gR2 is also supported but does not require interim patches to be installed.
30 Using the Oracle Toolkit in an HP Serviceguard Cluster