Supported Storage Options for Oracle Grid Infrastructure

The following table shows the storage options supported for Oracle Grid Infrastructure binaries and files:

Note:

Oracle ASM Filter Driver (ASMFD) is deprecated on both Linux and Oracle Solaris beginning with Oracle Database 19c. It will be desupported in a future release.

On Linux systems running kernel 5.14 or higher (including Oracle Linux, RedHat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server), ASMFD filtering is already disabled and will not be supported going forward. Oracle recommends moving to ASMlib v3 for those environments, as it provides equivalent functionality. For details, see My Oracle Support Note Document 2806979.1. Migration steps are available. On Oracle Solaris, ASMFD is deprecated, but remains fully supported. No immediate action is required until a formal desupport notice is issued.

Note:

The ACFS storage option on IBM AIX is deprecated in Oracle Database 19c.

Table 7-1 Supported Storage Options for Oracle Grid Infrastructure

Storage Option	OCR and Voting Files	Oracle Clusterware Binaries	Oracle RAC Database Binaries	Oracle RAC Database Data Files	Oracle RAC Database Recovery Files
Oracle Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM) Note: Loopback devices are not supported for use with Oracle ASM	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Oracle Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System (Oracle ACFS)	No	No	Yes	Yes for Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1) and later	Yes for Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1) and later
Local file system	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
OCFS2	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage devices	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes Note: In the Oracle Grid Infrastructure 19c release, NVMe-oF uses the kernel initiator, which exposes the disks as block devices.
Network file system (NFS) on a certified network-attached storage (NAS) filer Note: Direct NFS Client does not support Oracle Clusterware files	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Direct-attached storage (DAS)	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Shared disk partitions (block devices or raw devices)	No	No	No	No	No

Guidelines for Storage Options

Use the following guidelines when choosing storage options:

• You can choose any combination of the supported storage options for each file type provided that you satisfy all requirements listed for the chosen storage options.

• You can use Oracle ASM or shared file system to store Oracle Clusterware files.

• Direct use of raw or block devices is not supported.