Identifying and Using Existing Oracle Database Disk Groups on Oracle ASM

Identify existing disk groups and determine the free disk space that they contain. Optionally, identify failure groups for the Oracle ASM disk group devices.

If you intend to use a normal or high redundancy disk group, then you can further protect your database against hardware failure by associating a set of disk devices in a custom failure group. By default, each device comprises its own failure group. However, if two disk devices in a normal redundancy disk group are attached to the same SCSI controller, then the disk group becomes unavailable if the controller fails. The controller in this example is a single point of failure.

To protect against failures of this type, you could use two SCSI controllers, each with two disks, and define a failure group for the disks attached to each controller. This configuration would enable the disk group to tolerate the failure of one SCSI controller.

Note:

If you define custom failure groups, then you must specify a minimum of two failure groups for normal redundancy and three failure groups for high redundancy.

See Also:

Oracle Automatic Storage Management Administrator's Guide for information about Oracle ASM disk discovery