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I am about to build our first RAC development environment, and as I'm new to RAC and have not used ASM I wanted to keep things as simple as possible.

I was under the impression that ASM is a pre-requisite of RAC, but reading I've done recently implies it's optional (although ASM offers better performance particularly on reads).

So is a non-ASM RAC environment supported by Oracle? We are using 11.2.0.4 on a RedHat Linux 6 environment.

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  • ASM has to be used if you are building Standard Edition RAC. But if you are using Enterprise Edition - you can use other supported options like cluster file systems. – Mindaugas Riauba Apr 29 '15 at 8:11
  • Hi, can you point me at an oracle doc which details this please. We will be using SE. thanks – davegreen100 Apr 29 '15 at 8:34
  • Can you really implement RAC using SE? I thought EE was a pre-requisite for RAC. – a_horse_with_no_name Apr 29 '15 at 9:07
  • @a_horse_with_no_name SE1 single node is the cheapest way to do it due to pricing per socket, rather than core. Made it quite popular. – Philᵀᴹ Apr 29 '15 at 9:13
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i've found the definitive answer from the oracle docs

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/license.112/e47877/editions.htm#DBLIC109

in the Oracle Database Standard Edition and Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) section, it specifies

"Oracle Automatic Storage Management is required for creating and managing all Oracle database file types. Raw volumes, partitions, or third-party cluster file systems are not supported for storing Oracle database files with Oracle Standard Edition and Oracle RAC"

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Oracle RAC requires a clustered file system:

  1. ASM comes with the database
  2. ASM provides a clustered file system
  3. ASM was built specifically to do this

Anything else would be an additional cost 3rd party product that you would have to integrate and get working with your Oracle RAC.

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No it is not, but it is much easier. For example you can store Oracle datafiles on Veritas VxCFS. There are other certified cluster filesystems, but none of them is for free.

Also there was an option to not to use any filesystem. You could have "datafiles" on raw devices. But AFAIK this option is no more available.

PS: ASM does not offer better performance.

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  • thanks. My feeling for not going with ASM was that i didn't want to give myself 2 new things to learn in one go, Our development setup is virtual, we have setup some shared storage accessible by the 3 nodes in the cluster, for our existing single node instances we configure the disks into volume groups, and i'm thinking of doing the same with our initial RAC configuration. The book i'm currently reading suggests ASM gives better performance, but so far i have no first have experience. – davegreen100 Apr 29 '15 at 8:22

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