Oracle Database Tips by Donald Burleson

Oracle10g Grid Computing with RAC
Chapter 5 - Preparing Shared Storage

Once we make a decision to use either the raw devices or the cluster file system files, we need to make a plan for setting up the necessary storage volumes and file systems. The RAC system requires a minimum set of files/raw devices for creating default tablespaces and setting the redo log files, etc.

If we are going to use the DBCA utility to create the initial database, we need to meet certain requirements concerning the default schemas. We need to provide the raw devices or file systems to store them. Then we create the user-defined or business application-related schemas and tablespaces.

In the case of UNIX and Linux-oriented cluster platforms, most of the vendors provide some kind of volume manager or tool, which helps to create volumes of manageable size and layout at the host level. These volumes can be used by the RAC database as raw partitions. Optionally, when we have the facility of the cluster file system, we can make the file system and mount them. When we are planning to use the volumes as the raw partitions, we may have to plan and pre-create a large number of partitions with appropriate sizes. Fig, 5.14 shows the relation between the storage volumes and how they are presented for the use of the RAC database.