HP Enterprise Cluster Master Toolkit User Guide (5900-2131, December 2011)

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 were kept open on ASM disk group members even after the disk groups
had been 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 should 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, allowing
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 not supported by ASM include Oracle database server binaries, trace files, audit files,
alert logs, backup files, export files, tar files, and core files. Storage for application binaries and
data cannot be managed by ASM. 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 had been
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.
Supporting Oracle ASM instance and Oracle database with ASM 27