RAC Filesystem Options

Storage Options for RAC:
In this section we are going to discuss various file system options available to host Oracle Real application Cluster. Lets first understand what are all those file system and then we will see which file systems support Oracle RAC.

Following are the storage options to store Oracle database for RAC.

Raw: Raw Devices
ASM: Automatic Storage Management
CFS: Cluster File System
OCFS: Oracle Cluster File System
LVM: Logical Volume Manager
NFS: Network File System

Now lets find out what are all the physical stuffs that makes a Oracle Database:

1: Oracle Software (Called as Oracle Binaries)
2: Oracle Dumps (Known as bdump, cdump, udump, adump and spfile/pfile etc)
3: Oracle database files (Data files, Control Files and Redo log files )
4: Recovery Files (Oracle Archives and Oracle Flash back)
5: CRS Files (OCR (Oracle Cluster Registry) and Voting Disk. Applicable only for RAC database.)

As you know the above files are required to set up a database (Single Instance/RAC). Lets see which storage option is compatible to host these files:

RAW:
-------------------
Supported: Oracle Database Files and CRS
Not Supported: Oracle Software, Recovery files and Oracle Dumps
Platform: All Platforms

ASM:
------------------
Supported: Oracle Database Files and Recovery Files
Not Supported: Oracle Software, CRS and Oracle Dumps
Platform: All Platforms

CFS:
-----------------
Supported: All
Not Supported: None
Platform: AIX, HP Tru64 UNIX, SPARC Solaris

OCFS:
---------------
Supported: Oracle Database Files, CRS and Recovery Files
Not Supported: Oracle Software and Oracle Dumps
Platform: Windows, Linux

LVM:
--------------
Supported: All
Not Supported: None
Platform: HP-UX, HP Tru64 UNIX, SPARC Solaris

NFS:
-------------
Supported: All
Not Supported: None
Platform: Linux, SPARC Solaris