When installing Oracle Grid Infrastructure, you must determine the location of the Oracle home for Oracle Grid Infrastructure software (Grid home).

The Oracle Home directory that Oracle Grid Infrastructure is installed in is the Grid home. Oracle ASM is also installed in this home directory.

If you plan to install Oracle RAC, you must choose a different directory in which to install the Oracle Database software. The location of the Oracle RAC installation is the Oracle home.

The Grid home should be located in a path that is different from the Oracle home directory paths for any other Oracle software. The Optimal Flexible Architecture guideline for a Grid home is to create a path in the form \path\version\user, where \path is a string constant (C:\), \version is the version of the software (12.2.0), and \user is the installation owner of the Oracle Grid Infrastructure software (grid). During Oracle Grid Infrastructure for a cluster installation, permissions on the path of the Grid home are changed to the LocalSystem user, so any other users are unable to read, write, or execute commands in that path.

C:\12.2.0\grid

If you do not create a unique path to the Grid home, then after installing Oracle Grid Infrastructure, you can encounter permission errors for other installations by the grid user, including any existing installations under the same path. For example, if the Grid home is C:\app\12.2.0\grid, then the entire directory path, including C:\ and C:\app have restricted access. You would not be able to create an Oracle home with the path C:\app\oracle\product\12.2.0\db_home1 for the Oracle Database installation. To avoid permission problems, you can create and select paths such as the following for the Grid home:

C:\12.2.0\grid