I recently was asked an interesting question: "How is it possible to start the ASM instance if the spfile itself is stored in an ASM disk group? During ASM instance startup the disk groups themselves are closed, aren't they ?" Beginning with the version 11g Release 2, the ASM spfile is...

Managing a healthy cluster belongs to the most important goals of every cluster stack, and Oracle Clusterware is not an exception to this rule. To ensure cluster and data integrity unhealthy nodes should be forcefully evicted from a cluster. A node eviction will be initiated if: - cluster member cannot...

At the Oracle Open World 2011 in San Francisco Markus Michalewicz (Senior Principal Product Manager) announced in two sessions that there is a behavior change introduced with the 11.2.0.3 Patch Set regarding multicasting requirement for the cluster interconnect network. In the version 11.2.0.2 lack of...

Lately I've stared to work on a quite interesting Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) project, with HP blades and Virtual Connect. From flexibility point of view the decision has been made to install operating system (Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.6) on a multipath LUN (no local hard drives...

Traditionally high availability for Oracle cluster interconnect has been achieved with OS methods, like Linux kernel bonding module. The idea is simple: we aggregate at least two network cards into one bonded logical interface using different available modes like round-robin, active-backup, balance-xor...