Using a Cluster File System for Oracle Clusterware Files

Starting with Oracle Grid Infrastructure 12c Release 2 (12.2), you must use Oracle Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM) to store voting files and OCR files.

For new installations, use Oracle Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM) to store voting files and OCR files. For Linux 86-64 (64-bit) and Linux Itanium platforms, Oracle provides a cluster file system, OCFS2. However, Oracle does not recommend using OCFS2 for Oracle Clusterware files.

If your database files are stored on a shared file system, then you can continue to use the same for database files, instead of moving them to Oracle ASM storage.