1. Administrator's Guide
  2. Oracle Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System
  3. Introducing Oracle ACFS and Oracle ADVM
  4. Overview of Oracle ASM Dynamic Volume Manager

Overview of Oracle ASM Dynamic Volume Manager

Oracle ASM Dynamic Volume Manager (Oracle ADVM) provides volume management services and a standard disk device driver interface to clients.

File systems and other disk-based applications send I/O requests to Oracle ADVM volume devices as they would to other storage devices on a vendor operating system.

An Oracle ADVM volume device is constructed from an Oracle ASM dynamic volume. One or more Oracle ADVM volume devices may be configured within each Oracle ASM disk group. The Oracle ADVM Driver maps I/O requests against an Oracle ADVM volume device to blocks in a corresponding Oracle ASM dynamic volume and disk set located within an Oracle ASM disk group. An Oracle ADVM volume device exports Oracle ASM volume manager features and ensures that volume mirrors remain consistent in the face of abnormal system shutdowns, Oracle ASM instance failures, or system failures.

Oracle ADVM extends Oracle ASM by providing a disk driver interface to Oracle ASM storage allocated as Oracle ADVM volume files. You can use Oracle ADVM to create virtual disks that contain file systems. These file systems contained on Oracle ADVM volumes are able to support files beyond Oracle Database files, such as executable files, report files, trace files, alert logs, and other application data files. Because Oracle ADVM volumes are actually Oracle ASM files, they require the same administrative privileges as the Oracle ASM files.

Oracle Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System (Oracle ACFS) communicates with Oracle ASM through the Oracle ADVM interface. With the addition of the Oracle ADVM, Oracle ASM becomes a complete storage solution of user data for both database and non-database file needs.

To add a volume to an Oracle ASM disk group, disk group attributes COMPATIBLE.ASM and COMPATIBLE.ADVM must be set to '11.2'.

Note:

Dynamic volumes supersede traditional device partitioning. Each volume is individually named and may be configured for a single file system. Oracle ADVM volumes may be created on demand from Oracle ASM disk group storage and dynamically resized as required. These attributes make Oracle ADVM volumes far more flexible than physical devices and associated partitioning schemes.

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