The Server Control Utility (SRVCTL) is a command-line interface that you can use to manage Oracle Databases in a centralized manner. Oracle made centralized, SRVCTL-based database management available in Oracle Database 11g release 2 (11.2) for single-instance Oracle Databases, using Oracle ASM in the Oracle Grid Infrastructure, for both a noncluster environment and Oracle RAC databases, based on Oracle Grid Infrastructure for a cluster. This enables homogeneous management of all Oracle Database types using SRVCTL. You can use SRVCTL to start and stop the database and instances, and to delete or move instances and services. You can also use SRVCTL to add services and manage configuration information, in addition to other resources in the cluster.
When you use SRVCTL to perform configuration operations on your cluster, SRVCTL stores configuration data in the Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR) in a cluster or Oracle Local Registry (OLR) in Oracle Restart environments. SRVCTL performs other operations, such as starting and stopping instances, by configuring and managing Oracle Clusterware resources, which define agents that perform database startup and shutdown operations using Oracle Call Interface APIs.
Note:
If you require your database (or database instance) to start using certain environment variables, then use the srvctl setenv command to set those variables for the database profile that is maintained for the database using SRVCTL. You do not need to set the ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_SID environment variables, because SRVCTL maintains and sets those parameters, automatically.
See Also:
Server Control Utility Reference for more information about SRVCTL