16/12/2017 ORACLE-BASE - Automatic Storage Management (ASM) in Oracle Database 10g

Automatic Storage Management (ASM) in Oracle Database

10g
Automatic Storage Management (ASM) is a new feature that has be introduced in Oracle 10g to
simplify the storage of Oracle datafiles, controlfiles and logfiles.
Overview of Automatic Storage Management (ASM)
Initialization Parameters and ASM Instance Creation
Startup and Shutdown of ASM Instances
Administering ASM Disk Groups
Disks
Templates
Directories
Aliases
Files
Checking Metadata
ASM Filenames
ASM Views
SQL and ASM
Migrating to ASM Using RMAN
Related articles.
ASM using ASMLib and Raw Devices
Using NFS with ASM
Automatic Storage Manager (ASM) Enhancements in Oracle Database 11g Release 1
Oracle and RAID

Overview of Automatic Storage Management (ASM)

Automatic Storage Management (ASM) simplifies administration of Oracle related files by allowing
the administrator to reference disk groups rather than individual disks and files, which are managed
by ASM. The ASM functionality is an extention of the Oracle Managed Files (OMF) functionality
that also includes striping and mirroring to provide balanced and secure storage. The new ASM
functionality can be used in combination with existing raw and cooked file systems, along with OMF
and manually managed files.
The ASM functionality is controlled by an ASM instance. This is not a full database instance, just
the memory structures and as such is very small and lightweight.
The main components of ASM are disk groups, each of which comprise of several physical disks
that are controlled as a single unit. The physical disks are known as ASM disks, while the files that
reside on the disks are know as ASM files. The locations and names for the files are controlled by
ASM, but user-friendly aliases and directory structures can be defined for ease of reference.
The level of redundancy and the granularity of the striping can be controlled using templates.
Default templates are provided for each file type stored by ASM, but additional templates can be
defined as needed.
Failure groups are defined within a disk group to support the required level of redundancy. For two-
way mirroring you would expect a disk group to contain two failure groups so individual files are
written to two locations.
In summary ASM provides the following functionality:
Manages groups of disks, called disk groups.
Manages disk redundancy within a disk group.
Provides near-optimal I/O balancing without any manual tuning.
Enables management of database objects without specifying mount points and filenames.
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Supports large files.

It is worth taking a quick look at the following section of the documentation to familiarize yourself
with the basic requirements recommendations for ASM.
Recommendations for Storage Preparation

Initialization Parameters and ASM Instance Creation

The initialization parameters that are of specific interest for an ASM instance are:
INSTANCE_TYPE - Set to ASM or RDBMS depending on the instance type. The default is
RDBMS.
DB_UNIQUE_NAME - Specifies a globally unique name for the database. This defaults to +ASM
but must be altered if you intend to run multiple ASM instances.
ASM_POWER_LIMIT -The maximum power for a rebalancing operation on an ASM instance.
The valid values range from 1 to 11, with 1 being the default. The higher the limit the more
resources are allocated resulting in faster rebalancing operations. This value is also used as
the default when the POWER clause is omitted from a rebalance operation.
ASM_DISKGROUPS - The list of disk groups that should be mounted by an ASM instance during
instance startup, or by the ALTER DISKGROUP ALL MOUNT statement. ASM configuration
changes are automatically reflected in this parameter.
ASM_DISKSTRING - Specifies a value that can be used to limit the disks considered for
discovery. Altering the default value may improve the speed of disk group mount time and the
speed of adding a disk to a disk group. Changing the parameter to a value which prevents
the discovery of already mounted disks results in an error. The default value is NULL allowing
all suitable disks to be considered.
Incorrect usage of parameters in ASM or RDBMS instances result in ORA-15021 errors.
To create an ASM instance first create a file called "init+ASM.ora" in the "/tmp" directory containing
the following information.

INSTANCE_TYPE=ASM

Next, using SQL*Plus connect to the ide instance.

export ORACLE_SID=+ASM
sqlplus / as sysdba

Create an spfile using the contents of the "init+ASM.ora" file.

SQL> CREATE SPFILE FROM PFILE='/tmp/init+ASM.ora';

File created.

Finally, start the instance with the NOMOUNT option.

SQL> startup nomount

ASM instance started

Total System Global Area 125829120 bytes

Fixed Size 1301456 bytes
Variable Size 124527664 bytes
Database Buffers 0 bytes
Redo Buffers 0 bytes
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Redo Buffers 0 bytes
SQL>

The ASM instance is now ready to use for creating and mounting disk groups. To shutdown the
ASM instance issue the following command.

SQL> shutdown
ASM instance shutdown
SQL>

Once an ASM instance is present disk groups can be used for the following parameters in
database instances ( INSTANCE_TYPE=RDBMS ) to allow ASM file creation:
DB_CREATE_FILE_DEST
DB_CREATE_ONLINE_LOG_DEST_n
DB_RECOVERY_FILE_DEST
CONTROL_FILES
LOG_ARCHIVE_DEST_n
LOG_ARCHIVE_DEST
STANDBY_ARCHIVE_DEST

Startup and Shutdown of ASM Instances

ASM instance are started and stopped in a similar way to normal database instances. The options
for the STARTUP command are:
FORCE - Performs a SHUTDOWN ABORT before restarting the ASM instance.
MOUNT - Starts the ASM instance and mounts the disk groups specified by
the ASM_DISKGROUPS parameter.
NOMOUNT - Starts the ASM instance without mounting any disk groups.
OPEN - This is not a valid option for an ASM instance.

The options for the SHUTDOWN command are:

NORMAL - The ASM instance waits for all connected ASM instances and SQL sessions to exit
then shuts down.
IMMEDIATE - The ASM instance waits for any SQL transactions to complete then shuts down.
It doesn't wait for sessions to exit.
TRANSACTIONAL - Same as IMMEDIATE .
ABORT - The ASM instance shuts down instantly.

Administering ASM Disk Groups

There are a few basic points to consider when planning to use ASM:
In most cases you will only need two disk groups (DATA and FRA), where DATA holds all
database related files and FRA holds the fast recovery area, including multiplexed copies on
online redo logs and controlfiles. Typically, the FRA disk group will be twice the size of the
DATA disk group, since it must hold all backups.
Oracle recommend a minimum of 4 LUNs per disk group, with LUNs using hardware RAID
and external redundancy if possible.
All LUNs within a disk group should be the same size and have the same performance
characteristics.
LUNs should be made up from disks dedicated to Oracle, not shared with other applications.
Now let's look at basic administration of disk groups.

Disks

Disk groups are created using the CREATE DISKGROUP

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Disk groups are created using the CREATE DISKGROUP statement. This statement allows you to
specify the level of redundancy:
NORMAL REDUNDANCY - Two-way mirroring, requiring two failure groups.
HIGH REDUNDANCY - Three-way mirroring, requiring three failure groups.
EXTERNAL REDUNDANCY - No mirroring for disks that are already protected using hardware
mirroring or RAID. If you have hardware RAID it should be used in preference to ASM
redundancy, so this will be the standard option for most installations.
In addition failure groups and preferred names for disks can be defined. If the NAME clause is
omitted the disks are given a system generated name like "disk_group_1_0001". The FORCE option
can be used to move a disk from another disk group into this one.

CREATE DISKGROUP disk_group_1 NORMAL REDUNDANCY

FAILGROUP failure_group_1 DISK
'/devices/diska1' NAME diska1,
'/devices/diska2' NAME diska2
FAILGROUP failure_group_2 DISK
'/devices/diskb1' NAME diskb1,
'/devices/diskb2' NAME diskb2;

Disk groups can be deleted using the DROP DISKGROUP statement.

DROP DISKGROUP disk_group_1 INCLUDING CONTENTS;

Disks can be added or removed from disk groups using the ALTER DISKGROUP statement.
Remember that the wildcard "*" can be used to reference disks so long as the resulting string does
not match a disk already used by an existing disk group.

-- Add disks.
ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 ADD DISK
'/devices/disk*3',
'/devices/disk*4';

-- Drop a disk.
ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 DROP DISK diska2;

Disks can be resized using the RESIZE clause of the ALTER DISKGROUP statement. The statement
can be used to resize individual disks, all disks in a failure group or all disks in the disk group. If
the SIZE clause is omitted the disks are resized to the size of the disk returned by the OS.

-- Resize a specific disk.

ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1
RESIZE DISK diska1 SIZE 100G;

-- Resize all disks in a failure group.

ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1
RESIZE DISKS IN FAILGROUP failure_group_1 SIZE 100G;

-- Resize all disks in a disk group.

ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1
RESIZE ALL SIZE 100G;

The UNDROP DISKS clause of the ALTER DISKGROUP

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The UNDROP DISKS clause of the ALTER DISKGROUP statement allows pending disk drops to be
undone. It will not revert drops that have completed, or disk drops associated with the dropping of a
disk group.

ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 UNDROP DISKS;

Disk groups can be rebalanced manually using the REBALANCE clause of the ALTER
DISKGROUP statement. If the POWER clause is omitted the ASM_POWER_LIMIT parameter value is
used. Rebalancing is only needed when the speed of the automatic rebalancing is not appropriate.

ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 REBALANCE POWER 5;

Disk groups are mounted at ASM instance startup and unmounted at ASM instance shutdown.
Manual mounting and dismounting can be accomplished using the ALTER DISKGROUP statement as
seen below.

ALTER DISKGROUP ALL DISMOUNT;

ALTER DISKGROUP ALL MOUNT;
ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 DISMOUNT;
ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 MOUNT;

Templates
Templates are named groups of attributes that can be applied to the files within a disk group. The
following example show how templates can be created, altered and dropped.

-- Create a new template.

ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 ADD TEMPLATE my_template ATTRIBUTES (MIRROR FINE);

-- Modify template.
ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 ALTER TEMPLATE my_template ATTRIBUTES (COARSE);

-- Drop template.
ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 DROP TEMPLATE my_template;

Available attributes include:

UNPROTECTED - No mirroring or striping regardless of the redundancy setting.
MIRROR - Two-way mirroring for normal redundancy and three-way mirroring for high
redundancy. This attribute cannot be set for external redundancy.
COARSE - Specifies lower granuality for striping. This attribute cannot be set for external
redundancy.
FINE - Specifies higher granularity for striping. This attribute cannot be set for external
redundancy.

Directories
A directory heirarchy can be defined using the ALTER DISKGROUP statement to support ASM file
aliasing. The following examples show how ASM directories can be created, modified and deleted.

-- Create a directory.
ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 ADD DIRECTORY '+disk_group_1/my_dir';

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-- Rename a directory.
ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 RENAME DIRECTORY '+disk_group_1/my_dir' TO '+disk_group_1/my_

-- Delete a directory and all its contents.

ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 DROP DIRECTORY '+disk_group_1/my_dir_2' FORCE;

Aliases
Aliases allow you to reference ASM files using user-friendly names, rather than the fully qualified
ASM filenames.

-- Create an alias using the fully qualified filename.

ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 ADD ALIAS '+disk_group_1/my_dir/my_file.dbf'
FOR '+disk_group_1/mydb/datafile/my_ts.342.3';

-- Create an alias using the numeric form filename.

ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 ADD ALIAS '+disk_group_1/my_dir/my_file.dbf'
FOR '+disk_group_1.342.3';

-- Rename an alias.
ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 RENAME ALIAS '+disk_group_1/my_dir/my_file.dbf'
TO '+disk_group_1/my_dir/my_file2.dbf';

-- Delete an alias.
ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 DELETE ALIAS '+disk_group_1/my_dir/my_file.dbf';

Attempting to drop a system alias results in an error.

Files
Files are not deleted automatically if they are created using aliases, as they are not Oracle
Managed Files (OMF), or if a recovery is done to a point-in-time before the file was created. For
these circumstances it is necessary to manually delete the files, as shown below.

-- Drop file using an alias.

ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 DROP FILE '+disk_group_1/my_dir/my_file.dbf';

-- Drop file using a numeric form filename.

ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 DROP FILE '+disk_group_1.342.3';

-- Drop file using a fully qualified filename.

ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 DROP FILE '+disk_group_1/mydb/datafile/my_ts.342.3';

Checking Metadata
The internal consistency of disk group metadata can be checked in a number of ways using
the CHECK clause of the ALTER DISKGROUP statement.

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-- Check metadata for a specific file.

ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 CHECK FILE '+disk_group_1/my_dir/my_file.dbf'

-- Check metadata for a specific failure group in the disk group.

ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 CHECK FAILGROUP failure_group_1;

-- Check metadata for a specific disk in the disk group.

ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 CHECK DISK diska1;

-- Check metadata for all disks in the disk group.

ALTER DISKGROUP disk_group_1 CHECK ALL;

ASM Views
The ASM configuration can be viewed using the V$ASM_% views, which often contain different
information depending on whether they are queried from the ASM instance, or a dependant
database instance.

View ASM Instance

V$ASM_ALIAS Displays a row for each alias present in every disk group mounted by the ASM instan

V$ASM_CLIENT Displays a row for each database instance using a disk group managed by the ASM

V$ASM_DISK Displays a row for each disk discovered by the ASM instance, including disks which

V$ASM_DISKGROUP Displays a row for each disk group discovered by the ASM instance.

V$ASM_FILE Displays a row for each file for each disk group mounted by the ASM instance.

V$ASM_OPERATION Displays a row for each file for each long running operation executing in the ASM ins

V$ASM_TEMPLATE Displays a row for each template present in each disk group mounted by the ASM in

ASM Filenames
There are several ways to reference ASM file. Some forms are used during creation and some for
referencing ASM files. The forms for file creation are incomplete, relying on ASM to create the fully
qualified name, which can be retrieved from the supporting views. The forms of the ASM filenames
are summarised below.

Filename Type Format

Fully Qualified ASM Filename +dgroup/dbname/file_type/file_type_tag.file.incarnation

Numeric ASM Filename +dgroup.file.incarnation

Alias ASM Filenames +dgroup/directory/filename

Alias ASM Filename with Template +dgroup(template)/alias

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Incomplete ASM Filename +dgroup

Incomplete ASM Filename with Template +dgroup(template)

SQL and ASM

ASM filenames can be used in place of conventional filenames for most Oracle file types, including
controlfiles, datafiles, logfiles etc. For example, the following command creates a new tablespace
with a datafile in the disk_group_1 disk group.

CREATE TABLESPACE my_ts DATAFILE '+disk_group_1' SIZE 100M AUTOEXTEND ON;

Migrating to ASM Using RMAN

The following method shows how a primary database can be migrated to ASM from a disk based
backup:
Disable change tracking (only available in Enterprise Edition) if it is currently being used.

SQL> ALTER DATABASE DISABLE BLOCK CHANGE TRACKING;

Shutdown the database.

SQL> SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE

Modify the parameter file of the target database as follows:

Set the DB_CREATE_FILE_DEST and DB_CREATE_ONLINE_LOG_DEST_n parameters to the
relevant ASM disk groups.
Remove the CONTROL_FILES parameter from the spfile so the control files will be moved
to the DB_CREATE_* destination and the spfile gets updated automatically. If you are
using a pfile the CONTROL_FILES parameter must be set to the appropriate ASM files or
aliases.
Start the database in nomount mode.

RMAN> STARTUP NOMOUNT

Restore the controlfile into the new location from the old location.

RMAN> RESTORE CONTROLFILE FROM 'old_control_file_name';

Mount the database.

RMAN> ALTER DATABASE MOUNT;

Copy the database into the ASM disk group.

RMAN> BACKUP AS COPY DATABASE FORMAT '+disk_group';

Switch all datafile to the new ASM location.

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RMAN> SWITCH DATABASE TO COPY;

Open the database.

RMAN> ALTER DATABASE OPEN;

Create new redo logs in ASM and delete the old ones.
Enable change tracking if it was being used.

SQL> ALTER DATABASE ENABLE BLOCK CHANGE TRACKING;

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