Installation guide

the standalone and RAC configurations. The NFS file system is supported with certified NFS servers.
The main difficulties with storage configuration are related to the dynamic device detection processes in the
Linux kernel. Devices may be recognized in the different order across reboots and as a result, their kernel names
are not persistent. Usually, this is not a problem for devices with file systems or devices included into LVM vol-
ume groups because tools used to format file systems or create volumes can also create unique labels that can be
used as persistent references to the devices. Oracle Clusterware and ASM require additional configuration steps
to ensure device name persistence and set the right combination of device ownership and access permissions.
We will consider the two most common storage configurations:
● Oracle 10g RAC or standalone server with single path storage devices and ASM. This is typical for virtu-
al machines or non-production environments.
● Oracle 10g RAC or standalone server with Linux native multipathing and ASM.
The difference between RAC and standalone configurations is in the Oracle Clusterware, a RAC foundation
component requiring special storage configuration for its files, the Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR), its optional
mirror(s), and the Cluster Synchronization Services (CSS) voting disk(s). In the production setup, Oracle RAC
should be configured with at least two OCR disks (primary and mirror) and three voting disks. Each OCR and
voting disk should be at least 300MB in size. The minimal setup requires one OCR and one voting disk. The
Clusterware files can be created on the partitioned devices.
It is recommended to place the Server Parameter File (SPFILE) for the Oracle ASM instance on a separate par-
tition. It may coexist on the same LUN with one of OCR and voting disk partitions. The recommended size is
300MB.
Oracle 10g server with ASM uses at least two storage areas:
● The first is for database datafiles, online redo log files, control files, SPFILES for database instances,
and temp files for temporary tablespaces.
● The second is for the Oracle Flash Recovery. It should be twice the size of the database data area.
It is recommended to separate the above storage areas onto their own LUNs on separate disk groups. The sepa-
ration can enable better I/O performance by ensuring these files do not share the same physical disks.
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