Oracle Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM) Disk Creation Failure

Issue

Oracle ASM disk creation fails.

Description

ASM disks tend to be used and purged over time. If an ASM instance is purged and physical ASM disks are left in their existing spurious state, they contain diskgroup information that can interfere with future ASM creation. This happens if the newly created ASM uses the same diskgroup name as exists in the header of such a raw disk. If such a spurious disk exists in the disk discovery path of the newly created ASM it will get consumed and raise unexpected error.

Solution

Ensure that disk discovery path is as restrictive as possible. Also, ASM disks should be zeroed out as soon as ASM is being purged. Deployment procedures that support post 11.2 RDBMS have elaborate checks to detect the use case and warn the user beforehand.