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I am about to build our first RAC development environment, and as I'm new to RAC and have not used ASM I wanted to keep things as simple as possible.

I was under the impression that ASM is a pre-requisite of RAC, but reading I've done recently implies it's optional (although ASM offers better performance particularly on reads).

So is a non-ASM RAC environment supported by Oracle? We are using 11.2.0.4 on a RedHat Linux 6 environment.

Colin 't Hart
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davegreen100
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3 Answers3

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i've found the definitive answer from the oracle docs

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/license.112/e47877/editions.htm#DBLIC109

in the Oracle Database Standard Edition and Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) section, it specifies

"Oracle Automatic Storage Management is required for creating and managing all Oracle database file types. Raw volumes, partitions, or third-party cluster file systems are not supported for storing Oracle database files with Oracle Standard Edition and Oracle RAC"

davegreen100
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Oracle RAC requires a clustered file system:

  1. ASM comes with the database
  2. ASM provides a clustered file system
  3. ASM was built specifically to do this

Anything else would be an additional cost 3rd party product that you would have to integrate and get working with your Oracle RAC.

Gryu
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tesla747
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No it is not, but it is much easier. For example you can store Oracle datafiles on Veritas VxCFS. There are other certified cluster filesystems, but none of them is for free.

Also there was an option to not to use any filesystem. You could have "datafiles" on raw devices. But AFAIK this option is no more available.

PS: ASM does not offer better performance.

ibre5041
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