ASM Features

PURPOSE
-------
Automatic Storage Management is a file system and volume manager built
into the database kernel that allows the practical management of
thousands of disk drives with 24x7 availability.
It provides management across multiple nodes of a cluster for Oracle
Real Application
Clusters (RAC) support as well as single SMP machines.
It automatically does load balancing in parallel across all availabledisk drives to prevent hot spots and maximize performance, even withrapidly
changing data usage patterns.
It prevents fragmentation so that there is never a need to relocatedata to reclaim space.Data is well balanced and striped over all disks.
It does automatic online disk space reorganization for the incremental
addition or removal of storage capacity.
It can maintain redundant copies of data to provide fault tolerance, or
it can be built on top of vendor supplied reliable storage mechanisms.
Data management is done by selecting the desired reliability and
performance characteristics for classes of data rather than with human
interaction on a per file basis.
ASM solves many of the practical management problems of large Oracle
databases.
As the size of a database server increases towards thousands of disk
drives, or tens of nodes in a cluster, the traditional techniques for
management stop working.They do not scale efficiently, theybecome too
prone to human error, and they require independent effort on every node
of a cluster.
Other tasks, such as manual load balancing, become so complex as to
prohibit their application.
These problems must be solved for the reliable management of databases
in the tens or hundreds of terabytes. Oracle is uniquely positioned to
solve these problems as a result of our existingReal Application
Cluster technology.
Oracle’s control of the solution ensures it is reliable and integrated
with Oracle products.
This document is intended to give some insight into the internal
workings of ASM.

It is not a detailed design document. It should be useful for people

that need to support ASM.
Automatic Storage Management is part of the database kernel. It is
linked into
$ORACLE_HOME/bin/oracle so that its code may be executed by all
database processes.
One portion of the ASM code allows for the start-up of a special
instance called an ASM Instance. ASM Instances do not mount databases,
but instead manage the metadata needed to make ASM files available to
ordinary database instances.
Both ASM Instances and database instances have access to some common
set of disks.
ASM Instances manage the metadata describing the layout of the ASM
files. Database instances access the contents of ASM files directly,
communicating with an ASM instance only to get information about the
layout of these files.This requires that a second portion of the ASM
code run in the database instance, in the I/O path.
Note:
1. One and only one ASM instance required per node. So you might have
multiple databases, but they will share the same single ASM.
2. ASM is for DATAFILE, CONTROLFILE, REDOLOG, ARCHIVELOG and SPFILE. So

you can use CFS for commonoracle binary in RAC.

3. ASM can provide mirroring for files in a disk group.

4. In external redundancy disk groups, ASM does not mirroring.For

normal redundancy,ASM 2-way mirrors files by default, but can also
leave files unprotected.
[Unprotected files are not recommended]. For high redundancy
disk groups, ASM 3-way mirrors files.
5. Unless a user specifies an ASM alias filename during file creation,
the file is OMF.OMF files are deleted automatically when the higher
level object (eg tablespace)is dropped, whereas non-OMF files must be
manually deleted. Oracle is recommending to use OMF.
HOW TO USE ?

------------

Use DBCA to configure your ASM.

DBCA eases the configuring and creation of your database while EM

provides an integrated approach for managing both your ASM instance and
database instance.
Automatic Storage Management is always installed by the Oracle
Universal Installer when you install your database software. The
Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) determines if an ASM
instance already exists, and if not, then you are given the option of
creating and configuring an ASM instance as part of database creation
and configuration. If an ASM instance already exists,
then it is used instead.

DBCA also configures your instance parameter file and password file.
Steps in DBCA:
1. Choose ASM disk.
2. Create diskgroup by choosing available disk.
3. While creating ASM you have choice of mirroring for files in a disk
group and the options are like below
HIGH, NORMAL or EXTERNAL.
High
-> ASM 3-way mirrors
Normal
-> ASM 2-way mirrors
External -> If you have already mirror disk in H/W label like EMC or
another third party
4. dbca will create a separate instance called "+ASM" which will be in
nomount stage to control your ASM.
5. Choose your all datafile, controlfile, redolog and spfile to your

ASM volume.

Preinstall:

Here DBA will create the ASM volume, so Sysadmin should give the
ownership or proper privs to DBA.
Example in LINUX

----------------

You have two disk say "/dev/sdf" and "/dev/sdg"

Determine what those devices are bound as raw:

$ /usr/bin/raw -qa

If not:

Include devices in diskgroups by editing /etc/sysconfig/rawdevices :

eg
/dev/raw/raw1 /dev/sdf

/dev/raw/raw2 /dev/sdg

Set owner, group and permission on device file for each raw device:

$ chown oracle:dba /dev/raw/rawn, chmod 660 /dev/raw/rawn

Bind disk devices to raw devices:

$ service rawdevices restart

IMPORTANT VIEW in ASM
=====================
V$ASM_DISKGROUP
V$ASM_CLIENT
V$ASM_DISK
V$ASM_TEMPLATE
V$ASM_ALIAS
V$ASM_OPERA

So from DBCA you can see the device "raw1" and "raw2".

After finishing of ASM volume creation, when you create a database on

an ASM volume, you should see the file details using Enterprise Manager(EM). Or you can use V$ or DBA view to check the datafile name.
Oraclerecommended not to specify the datafile name while adding datafile orcreating new tablespace, because ASM will automatically
generateOMF file.
Note: If DBA's by mistake or intentionally choose the datafile name,
dropping oftablespace, will not drop the datafile from ASM volume.