This is not entirely true. When setting up a new rac, raw or block devices are no longer supported for the voting disks or the cluster registry, but it does not mean that you can't use a different cluster filesystem then ASM to hold them. It is perfectly valid to use NFS as clustered filesystem (except when you use standard edition rac) Also when you upgrade an existing environment, it is still possible to keep your voting disks and/or cluster registry on raw/block devices. Regards, Freek D'Hooge Uptime Oracle Database Administrator email: freek.dhooge@xxxxxxxxx tel +32(0)3 451 23 82 http://www.uptime.be disclaimer: www.uptime.be/disclaimer ________________________________________ From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of LS Cheng Sent: donderdag 1 juli 2010 7:41 To: david.robillard@xxxxxxxxx Cc: oracle-l mailing list Subject: Re: OCR / VD external vs. normal redundancy using NFS. Hi In 11gR2 Grid Infrastructure you have to store OCR and Voting Disk inside ASM Disk Groups. There is no other storage option which you can use during installation. The only exception is when you are upgrading 10g to 11gR2 Thanks -- LSC On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 4:43 PM, David Robillard <david.robillard@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: Hello everyone, I'd like to know how does each of us configure redundancy for both the Grid Infrastructure's Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR) and Voting disks (VD) when they're stored over NFSv3 on an enterprise grade storage array with RAID disks. Do you use external or normal redundancy for OCR and VD? I'm looking to install Grid Infrastructure 11gR2 on RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 x86_64 over NFSv3 on a clustered Sun/Oracle Unified Storage 7410. The storage array has built-in redundancy on every components. Each cluster node has two quad-ethernet network interface cards (NIC). All network interfaces are built with two ports, one on each NIC, to create a private (bond0), public (bond1) and storage (bond2) interface. There are two redundant GbE switches dedicated for a storage-only non-routable subnet. Quick note, I'm not using ASM over iSCSI for various reasons. Mostly because every paper I read from NetApp/Sun/Oracle/EMC says the performance of ASM with software initiator iSCSI is not as good as NFS. Also because it's easier to manage the storage array's total disk space when using NFS instead of iSCSI. I'm also not using Oracle's dNFS feature simply because I haven't had the time to look at it and I've been working with NFS for over 10 years. Plus I'm also lucky (?) enough to be the UNIX sysadmin, the storage array administrator and the DBA, so I don't need to configure everything from the Oracle stand-point (i.e. I can't do finger pointing in case things go wrong, I'm the only one to blame). With that in mind, which option would you choose and why? Option A) Create an NFS share for OCR and another one for VD then use external redundancy. That would generate the following mount points: OCR = /u01/ocr/cluster.registry VD = /u01/vd/voting.disk -or- Option B) Create three different NFS shares for OCR and three other shares for VD then use normal redundancy. That would create the following mount points: OCR 1 = /u01/ocr/ocr1/cluster.registry OCR 2 = /u02/ocr/ocr2/cluster.registry OCR 3 = /u03/ocr/ocr3/cluster.registry VD 1 = /u01/vd/vd1/voting.disk VD 2 = /u02/vd/vd2/voting.disk VD 3 = /u03/vd/vd3/voting.disk Of course there are other options and variations. I welcome all comments and critics on that setup :) Many thanks, David -- David Robillard, UNIX team leader and Oracle DBA CISSP, RHCE, SCSA & SCSECA -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l