HP Serviceguard Toolkit for Oracle Data Guard manual What is Automatic Storage Management ASM?

For more information on modular packages, see the whitepaper Modular package support in Serviceguard for Linux and ECM Toolkits available at http://www.hp.com/go/ hpux-serviceguard-docs —>HP Serviceguard Enterprise Cluster Master Toolkit.

Also, refer the whitepaper "Migrating Packages from Legacy to Modular Style, October 2007" for more information. You can find this whitepaper at http://www.hp.com/go/ hpux-serviceguard-docs-> HP Enterprise Cluster Master Toolkit .

5.For a running database package, if the value of any of the package attribute needs to be modified, then the package needs to be restarted. The following steps should be followed to update the attribute values of a running database package:

a.Edit the package configuration file and populate the new values.

b.Halt the package.

c.Apply the package configuration file.

d.Start the package.

Supporting Oracle ASM instance and Oracle database with ASM

This section discusses the use of the Oracle database server feature called Automatic Storage Management (ASM) in HP Serviceguard for single database instance failover. Serviceguard Extension for RAC (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 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 a bundle of Oracle 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.

26 Using the Oracle Toolkit in an HP Serviceguard Cluster