Skip to content

Oracle ASM Disk Groups in Oracle 19c

    Oracle ASM disk groups Administration includes creating, altering, dropping, mounting, and dismounting tasks.

    Creating the DATA disk group

    CREATE DISKGROUP data NORMAL REDUNDANCY
  FAILGROUP controller1 DISK
    '/devices/diska1' NAME diska1,
    '/devices/diska2' NAME diska2,
    '/devices/diska3' NAME diska3,
    '/devices/diska4' NAME diska4
  FAILGROUP controller2 DISK
    '/devices/diskb1' NAME diskb1,
    '/devices/diskb2' NAME diskb2,
    '/devices/diskb3' NAME diskb3,
    '/devices/diskb4' NAME diskb4
  ATTRIBUTE 'au_size'='4M',
    'compatible.asm' = '19.0', 
    'compatible.rdbms' = '19.0',
    'compatible.advm' = '19.0';

    Creating the FRA disk group

    CREATE DISKGROUP fra NORMAL REDUNDANCY
  DISK '/devices/diskc*';

    You can determine the logical sector and sector size values that have either been assumed or explicitly set for a successful disk group creation by querying V$ASM views or running ASMCMD commands. The LOGICAL_SECTOR_SIZE and SECTOR_SIZE columns are included in the V$ASM_DISKGROUP and V$ASM_ATTRIBUTE views to display the values. These columns represent the logical sector size and sector size values of the disk group in bytes. The ASMCMD lsdg also displays the values of the logical sector size and sector size for the disk group. In addition, the disk group attributes are displayed with the V$ASM_ATTRIBUTE view and the ASMCMD lsattr command. For example:

    SQL> SELECT name, value FROM V$ASM_ATTRIBUTE 
     WHERE (name = 'sector_size' OR name = 'logical_sector_size') AND group_number = 1;
NAME                          VALUE
----------------------------- ---------------------------
sector_size                   4096
logical_sector_size           512

SQL> SELECT logical_sector_size, sector_size FROM V$ASM_DISKGROUP 
     WHERE group_number = 1;
LOGICAL_SECTOR_SIZE SECTOR_SIZE
------------------- -----------
                512        4096

    Specifying logical and sector sizes for disks in a disk group

    CREATE DISKGROUP data NORMAL REDUNDANCY
  FAILGROUP controller1 DISK
    '/devices/diska1',
    '/devices/diska2',
    '/devices/diska3',
    '/devices/diska4'
  FAILGROUP controller2 DISK
    '/devices/diskb1',
    '/devices/diskb2',
    '/devices/diskb3',
    '/devices/diskb4'
  QUORUM FAILGROUP quorum_failgrp DISK '/devices/diskc1'
  ATTRIBUTE 'compatible.asm' = '12.2', 'compatible.rdbms' = '12.2',
            'sector_size'='4096', 'logical_sector_size'='512';

ALTER DISKGROUP data2  
  SET ATTRIBUTE 'compatible.asm' = '12.2', 'compatible.rdbms' = '12.2';

ALTER DISKGROUP data2
  SET ATTRIBUTE 'sector_size'='4096', 'logical_sector_size'='4096';

    Altering Disk Groups

    Managing volumes with ALTER DISKGROUP VOLUME statements

    SQL> ALTER DISKGROUP data ADD VOLUME volume1 SIZE 10G;
Diskgroup altered.

SQL> ALTER DISKGROUP data RESIZE VOLUME volume1 SIZE 15G;
Diskgroup altered.

SQL> ALTER DISKGROUP data DISABLE VOLUME volume1;
Diskgroup altered.

SQL> ALTER DISKGROUP data ENABLE VOLUME volume1;
Diskgroup altered.

SQL> ALTER DISKGROUP ALL DISABLE VOLUME ALL;
Diskgroup altered.

SQL> ALTER DISKGROUP data DROP VOLUME volume1;
Diskgroup altered.
    Using the ALTER DISKGROUP SQL Statement to Add Disks to a Disk Group

    The SQL examples in this topic demonstrate the interactions of disk discovery with the ADD DISK operation. Assume that disk discovery identifies the following disks in /devices directory:

    Copy/devices/diska1 -- member of data1
/devices/diska2 -- member of data1
/devices/diska3 -- member of data1
/devices/diska4 -- member of data1
/devices/diska5 -- candidate disk
/devices/diska6 -- candidate disk
/devices/diska7 -- candidate disk
/devices/diska8 -- candidate disk

/devices/diskb1 -- member of data1
/devices/diskb2 -- member of data1
/devices/diskb3 -- member of data1
/devices/diskb4 -- member of data2

/devices/diskc1 -- member of data2
/devices/diskc2 -- member of data2
/devices/diskc3 -- member of data3
/devices/diskc4 -- candidate disk

/devices/diskd1 -- candidate disk
/devices/diskd2 -- candidate disk
/devices/diskd3 -- candidate disk
/devices/diskd4 -- candidate disk
/devices/diskd5 -- candidate disk
/devices/diskd6 -- candidate disk
/devices/diskd7 -- candidate disk
/devices/diskd8 -- candidate disk

    You can query the V$ASM_DISK view to display the status of Oracle ASM disks.

    The following statement would fail because /devices/diska1 through /devices/diska4 currently belong to the disk group data1.

    ALTER DISKGROUP data1 ADD DISK
     '/devices/diska*';

    The following statement successfully adds disks /devices/diska5 and /devices/diska6 to data1. Because no FAILGROUP clauses are included in the ALTER DISKGROUP statement, each disk is assigned to its own failure group. The NAME clauses assign names to the disks, otherwise they would have been assigned system-generated names.

    ALTER DISKGROUP data1 ADD DISK
     '/devices/diska5' NAME diska5,
     '/devices/diska6' NAME diska6;

    When specifying a failure group, you can specify the type (regular or quorum) as well as the name. The failure group type value defaults to regular. You must include QUORUM FAILGROUP clause to specify a quorum failure group. The following statement successfully adds disks /devices/diska7 and /devices/diska8 to data1 using the FAILGROUP clause to specify a failure group.

    ALTER DISKGROUP data1 ADD FAILGROUP fg_diska78 DISK
     '/devices/diska7' NAME diska7,
     '/devices/diska8' NAME diska8;

    The following statement would fail because the search string matches disks that are contained in other disk groups. Specifically, /devices/diska4 belongs to disk group data1 and /devices/diskb4 belongs to disk group data2.

    ALTER DISKGROUP data1 ADD DISK
     '/devices/disk*4';

    The following statement would successfully add /devices/diskd1 through /devices/diskd8 to disk group data1. This statement runs with a rebalance power of 5, and does not return until the rebalance operation is complete.

    ALTER DISKGROUP data1 ADD DISK
      '/devices/diskd*'
       REBALANCE POWER 5 WAIT;

    If /devices/diskc3 was previously a member of a disk group that no longer exists, then you could use the FORCE option to add the disk as a member of another disk group. For example, the following use of the FORCE clause enables /devices/diskc3 to be added to data2, even though it is a current member of data3. For this statement to succeed, data3 cannot be mounted.

    ALTER DISKGROUP data2 ADD DISK
     '/devices/diskc3' FORCE;

    Replacing Disks in Disk Groups

    A disk or multiple disks in a disk group can be replaced, rather than dropped and added back.

    The single replace operation is more efficient than dropping and adding disks. This operation is especially useful when disks are missing or damaged.

    For example, you can issue the following statement to replace the diskc7 disk with another disk identified by the /devices/diskc18 path.

    SQL> ALTER DISKGROUP data2 REPLACE DISK diskc7 WITH '/devices/diskc18' POWER 3;

    The power option operates the same as the power option for the ALTER DISKGROUP REBALANCE statement, except that the power option cannot be set to 0.

    The ALTER DISKGROUP SQL statement with the REPLACE clause includes a WAIT or NOWAIT option, plus the FORCE option.

    Renaming Disks in Disk Groups

    For example, you can rename disks as follows:

    SQL> ALTER DISKGROUP fra2 MOUNT RESTRICTED;

SQL> ALTER DISKGROUP fra2 RENAME DISK 'FRA1_0001' TO 'FRA2_0001', 
       'FRA1_0002' TO 'FRA2_0002';

    For NORMAL, HIGH, and FLEX redundancy disk groups, you can associate a site name using ALTER DISKGROUP RENAME DISK with the SITE clause. For example:

    SQL> ALTER DISKGROUP data1 RENAME DISK 'DATA1_0001' SITE SITE1;

    For an EXTERNAL redundancy disk group, you can use ALTER DISKGROUP RENAME DISK with the FAILGROUP clause to specify a failure group for a disk. For example:

    SQL> ALTER DISKGROUP external1 RENAME DISK 'EXTERNAL1_0001' FAILGROUP FG_EXT1_0001;

    The SITE and FAILGROUP clauses cannot be used together in the same SQL ALTER DISKGROUP RENAME statement.

    Dropping Disks from Disk Groups

    Dropping disks from disk groups

    ALTER DISKGROUP data1 DROP DISK diska5;

ALTER DISKGROUP data1 DROP DISK diska5
     ADD FAILGROUP failgrp1 DISK '/devices/diska9' NAME diska9;

    Resizing Disks in Disk Groups

    The RESIZE clause of ALTER DISKGROUP enables you to resize disks in a disk group.

    Resizing disks in disk groups

    ALTER DISKGROUP data1 RESIZE ALL SIZE 100G;

    Undropping Disks in Disk Groups

    Undropping disks in disk groups

    ALTER DISKGROUP data1 UNDROP DISKS;

    Manually Rebalancing Disk Groups

    You can manually rebalance the files in a disk group using the REBALANCE clause of the ALTER DISKGROUP statement.

    ALTER DISKGROUP data2 REBALANCE MODIFY POWER 10;

    The the following SQL statement modifies the power setting to the default value.

    ALTER DISKGROUP data2 REBALANCE MODIFY POWER;

    When you rebalance a disk group, you have the option choosing the following phase options using the WITH or WITHOUT keywords, except where noted:

    • RESTOREThe RESTORE phase includes RESYNC, RESILVER, and REBUILD operations. The RESTORE phase is always run by default and cannot be excluded.
      • RESYNCThis operation synchronizes the stale extents on the disks that are being brought online.
      • RESILVERThis operation is specific only to Exadata systems. During this phase, data is copied from one mirror to the mirror with stale data.
      • REBUILDThis operation restores the redundancy of forcing disks only. Forcing disks are those disks that have been dropped with the force option.
    • BALANCEThis phase restores redundancy of all the disks in the disk group, including file groups, and also balances extents on Oracle ASM disks.
    • PREPAREThis phase completes the work corresponding to the prepare SQL operation. This phase is enabled only for FLEX or EXTENDED redundancy disk groups. COMPATIBLE.ASM must be set to 12.2 or higher.
    • COMPACTThis phase defragments and compacts extents across Oracle ASM disks.

    The rebalance operation executes the phases in the optimal order. If none of the phases are specified with the ALTER DISKGROUP...REBALANCE SQL statement, then the behavior remains the same as the rebalance operation previous to the Oracle ASM 12.2 release during which all rebalance phases are run.

    The following examples show the use of the phase options with ALTER DISKGROUP...REBALANCE:

    ALTER DISKGROUP data2 REBALANCE WITH BALANCE COMPACT;

ALTER DISKGROUP data3 REBALANCE WITHOUT BALANCE;

    Manually rebalancing a disk group

    ALTER DISKGROUP data2 REBALANCE RESTORE POWER 5 WAIT;

    The PASS column of V$ASM_OPERATION is updated for resync and rebalance operations. The contents of the column can be RESYNC, REBALANCE, or COMPACT. For example, the following SQL query shows values in the PASS column during a rebalance operation.

    SQL> SELECT GROUP_NUMBER, PASS, STATE FROM V$ASM_OPERATION;

GROUP_NUMBER PASS      STAT
------------ --------- ----
           2 RESYNC    WAIT
           2 REBALANCE WAIT
           2 COMPACT   WAIT

    Scrubbing Disk Groups

    Oracle ASM disk scrubbing improves availability and reliability by searching for data that may be less likely to be read. Disk scrubbing checks logical data corruptions and repairs them automatically in normal and high redundancy disks groups. The scrubbing process repairs logical corruptions using the mirror disks. Disk scrubbing can be combined with disk group rebalancing to reduce I/O resources. The disk scrubbing process has minimal impact to the regular I/O in production systems.

    SQL> ALTER DISKGROUP data SCRUB POWER LOW;

SQL> ALTER DISKGROUP data SCRUB FILE '+DATA/ORCL/DATAFILE/example.266.806582193' 
       REPAIR POWER HIGH FORCE;

SQL> ALTER DISKGROUP data SCRUB DISK DATA_0005 REPAIR POWER HIGH FORCE;

    Oracle ASM Disk Discovery

    Disk discovery is the mechanism used to find the operating system names for disks Oracle ASM can access.

    Querying V$ASM_DISK for header status

    SQL> SELECT name, header_status, path FROM V$ASM_DISK 
     WHERE path LIKE '/devices/disk0%';

NAME      HEADER_STATUS PATH
--------- ------------- ---------------------
          FORMER        /devices/disk02
          FORMER        /devices/disk01
          CANDIDATE     /devices/disk07
DISK06    MEMBER        /devices/disk06
DISK05    MEMBER        /devices/disk05
DISK04    MEMBER        /devices/disk04
DISK03    MEMBER        /devices/disk03
7 rows selected.

    Managing Capacity in Disk Groups

    When Oracle ASM provides redundancy, such as when you create a disk group with NORMAL or HIGH redundancy, you must have sufficient capacity in each disk group to manage a re-creation of data that is lost after a failure of one or two failure groups. After one or more disks fail, the process of restoring redundancy for all data requires space from the surviving disks in the disk group. If not enough space remains, then some files might end up with reduced redundancy.

    The results from the following query show capacity metrics for a normal redundancy disk group that consists of six 1 GB (1024 MB) disks, each in its own failure group:

    SQL> SELECT name, type, total_mb, free_mb, required_mirror_free_mb, 
     usable_file_mb FROM V$ASM_DISKGROUP;

NAME         TYPE     TOTAL_MB    FREE_MB REQUIRED_MIRROR_FREE_MB USABLE_FILE_MB
------------ ------ ---------- ---------- ----------------------- --------------
DATA         NORMAL       6144       3768                    1024           1372

    Using CREATE DISKGROUP with Compatibility Attributes

    The following example creates a normal redundancy disk group data1 with the Oracle ASM compatibility set to 19.0 and the RDBMS compatibility set to the default (the COMPATIBLE.RDBMS default is less than or equal to 19.0):

    CREATE DISKGROUP data1 DISK '/dev/sd*' 
       ATTRIBUTE 'compatible.asm' = '19.0';

    The following example creates a normal redundancy disk group data2 with the ASM, RDBMS, and ADVM compatibility set to 19.0:

    CREATE DISKGROUP data2 DISK '/dev/sd*' 
       ATTRIBUTE 'compatible.asm' = '19.0', 'compatible.rdbms' = '19.0',
                 'compatible.advm' = '19.0';

    Using ALTER DISKGROUP with Compatibility Attributes

    The following example advances the Oracle ASM compatibility for disk group data3 to 19.0. An Oracle ASM instance must be at Oracle ASM 19c or higher to access the data3 disk group.

    ALTER DISKGROUP data3 SET ATTRIBUTE 'compatible.asm' = '19.0';

    The following example advances the COMPATIBLE.RDBMS and COMPATIBLE.ADVM compatibility attributes of the disk group data3 to 10.0. This example assumes that the value of COMPATIBLE.ASM is set to 19.0.

    ALTER DISKGROUP data3 SET ATTRIBUTE 'compatible.rdbms' = '19.0',
ALTER DISKGROUP data3 SET ATTRIBUTE 'compatible.advm' = '19.0';

    Maintaining Disk Groups

    The following SQL statement dismounts all disk groups that are currently mounted to the Oracle ASM instance:

    ALTER DISKGROUP ALL DISMOUNT;

    The following SQL statement mounts disk group data1:

    ALTER DISKGROUP data1 MOUNT;

    The following example shows how to use the FORCE option to force the mount of the data1 disk group:

    SQL> ALTER DISKGROUP data1 MOUNT FORCE;

    The following example statement checks for consistency in the metadata for all disks in the data1 disk group:

    ALTER DISKGROUP data1 CHECK ALL;

    The following statement deletes data1:

    DROP DISKGROUP data1;

    This command enables you to remove the headers on disks that belong to a disk group that cannot be mounted by any Oracle ASM instances as shown in the following example:

    SQL> DROP DISKGROUP data1 FORCE;

    For More Information check Oracle Help Center:

    Oracle ASM Disk Groups