4.1 Using Oracle Grid Infrastructure with Exascale

This topic outlines how Exascale storage natively supports Oracle Grid Infrastructure.

Oracle Grid Infrastructure (GI) includes two critical components that manage GI cluster configuration and node membership: Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR), and voting files. Starting with Oracle Grid Infrastructure 23ai (release 23.5.0), you can use Exascale to natively store these critical files.

Following is a high-level overview of the procedure for configuring Oracle Grid Infrastructure in conjunction with Exascale. This procedure is automated for you when you use Oracle Exadata Deployment Assistant (OEDA) to create a VM cluster that uses Exascale storage.

1. Provision an Exascale user to manage the OCR and voting files.

   The same Exascale user must be used to access the OCR and voting files on all nodes in the GI cluster.

2. Create an Exascale vault for the OCR and voting files.

   You can dedicate a vault to store the OCR and voting files for a GI cluster, or you can use the vault to also store other files.

   To avoid potential confusion and compromised operations, you should not store the OCR and voting files for multiple GI clusters in one vault.

3. Install the Exascale user wallet into the Oracle Grid Infrastructure software on every node in the GI cluster.

4. Configure Oracle Grid Infrastructure to use the Exascale vault as the location for the OCR and voting files.

After configuration is completed, the OCR and voting files are located in the Exascale vault and can be accessed and managed like any Exascale file. Referencing the OCR and voting files on Exascale is essentially the same as using Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM). The fundamental difference is that you use an Exascale vault instead of an ASM disk group.

By default, the OCR and voting files are created with high redundancy (triple mirroring).