Naqi sent me the HP doc. It says that ASM->SLVM is for multi-pathing, global device naming and external-write protection... three of the reasons people deploy RAC on PolyServe in the Linux world btw... I have seen that Oracle is starting to admit this necessity in other technology stacks as well such as VxVM with Sol or AIX. The main reason for this requirement is to expedite ASM support with SGeRAC. We leverage existing HP-UX capabilities to provide multipathing for SLVM logical volumes, using either the PV Links feature, or separate products such as HP StorageWorks Secure Path that provide multipathing for specific types of disk arrays. Other advantages of the "ASM-over-SLVM" configuration are as follows: * ASM-over-SLVM ensures that the HP-UX devices used for disk group members will have the same names (the names of logical volumes in SLVM volume groups) on all nodes, easing ASM configuration. * ASM-over-SLVM protects ASM data against inadvertent overwrites from nodes inside/outside the cluster. If the ASM disk group members are raw disks, there is no protection currently preventing these disks from being incorporated into LVM or VxVM volume/disk groups. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l