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I have been asked to setup workstations (VMs) for an instructor's Oracle 11g R2 Workshop. I am finding the documentation that was downloaded from the Oracle Academy site extremely underwhelming. I am supposed to be configuring the environment with a set of ASM disks as LO devices that the students will then use to create an ASM disk group when they install Oracle Grid and as disks for the Fast Recovery Area.

My understanding is that the student will be installing Oracle Grid, Oracle Database, then creating a database, and that I do not need to have Oracle installed beforehand. However, the documentation makes use of the oracleasm command which comes with the Oracle installation.

Is there a way to set this up without installing Oracle? Has anyone ever setup/taught these workshops? I tried downloading the Oracle ASMLib tool here but it says it needs oracleasm as a dependency.

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  • What OS (and version) are you installing on?
    – Mat
    Mar 13, 2013 at 19:57
  • This is Oracle 11g Release 11.2.0.3.0 on RHEL 6.0.
    – emhohensee
    Mar 13, 2013 at 20:01
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    Check out the "Oracle ASMLib Software Update Policy for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Supported by Red Hat [ID 1089399.1]" doc on metalink - Oracle doesn't provide ASMLIB for RHEL 6 delivered-kernels. (Note that oracleasm isn't a requirement for ASM AFAIK, just something that makes it easier.)
    – Mat
    Mar 13, 2013 at 20:07
  • So are there other utilities that can create ASM disks without installing Oracle? The main issue is that I have to create ASM disks as part of the setup but the documentation does not mention installing Oracle. I only says to use the oracleasm utility and that "Both the database and clusterware software should be staged for the students."
    – emhohensee
    Mar 13, 2013 at 20:12
  • oracleasm doesn't really do much except "branding" disks/partitions with a specific header and helping with ASM configuration thanks to that. Raw disks or partitions can be used as ASM volumes without that. (I don't know about loopback devices though, but should work in theory I guess.)
    – Mat
    Mar 13, 2013 at 20:17

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Mat is right. ASMlib is only one way to created candidate disks for ASM. I would recommend you use udev as detailed here.

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I ended up redoing the installation on RHEL 5.5 so that I could utilize the ASMLIB to create the disks. Oracle does not support ASMLIB on RHEL 6 yet.

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