Oracle DBA Interview Questions and Answers - ASM

Explain ASM Architecture

The three major components of ASM are the ASM instance, ASM disk groups, and ASM files.

The ASM instance is a special Oracle instance—it does not have its own data files like a regularOracle database does. A single ASM instance on a server can manage the ASM file systems for all the Oracle databases on that server. The ASM instance looks after disk groups and gives the database access to the ASM files. The database makes the initial contact with the ASM instance to get information on the data files, but it accesses those files directly. The ASM instance must be running for an Oracle database to use the ASM file system, and the ASM instance can’t be shut down while the other Oracle databases using ASM file systems are still running, since those databases will crash without the ASM instance.

ASM disk groups are somewhat analogous to logical volumes created by a Logical Volume Manager. Unlike the usual Oracle database files, you don’t access ASM files directly. Disks in an ASM context are rather loosely defined and can include a partition of a disk spindle or the entire disk spindle itself. This depends on how the storage system represents the logical unit number (LUN) to the operating system. Any LUN or a disk represented to the operating system is called a disk. Since each operating system could have a different disk-naming system, check your disk-naming system.

 ASM files are part of an ASM disk group, which contains all your database files. ASM manages a disk group consisting of several disk drives as a single unit, and it spreads the data evenly among all the disks in the group. You don’t have to change the management of your database if you want to switch to an ASM system, because you can use your operating system–based files with the new ASM files. Logical concepts such as extents, segments, and tablespaces work the same way under an ASM
system.

Here’s a summary of an ASM storage system:
• A database is allowed to have multiple disk groups.
• You can store all of your Oracle database files as ASM files because Oracle sets up a one-toone
mapping between an Oracle database file (data files and control files, for example) and
an ASM file.
• An ASM disk group comprises a set of disk drives.
• ASM disk groups are permitted to contain files from more than one disk.
• ASM files always spread over every disk in an ASM disk group and belong to one disk
group only.
• ASM allocates disk space in allocation units of 1MB.

What is ASM(Automatic Storage Management)

Oracle ASM is Oracle’s volume manager specially designed for Oracle database data. It is available since Oracle database version 10g and many improvements have been made in versions 11g release 1 and 2.

ASM offers support for Oracle RAC clusters without the requirement to install 3rd party software, such as cluster aware volume managers or filesystems.

ASM is shipped as part of the database server software (Enterprise and Standard editions) and does not cost extra money to run.

ASM simplifies administration of Oracle related files by allowing the administrator to reference disk groups
rather than individual disks and files, which are managed by ASM.

The ASM functionality is an extention of the Oracle Managed Files (OMF) functionality that also includes striping and mirroring to provide balanced and secure storage. The new ASM functionality can be used in combination with existing raw and cooked file systems, along with OMF and manually managed files.

What are the key benefits of ASM

ASM provides automatic load balancing over all the available disks, thus reducing hot spots
in the file system.

• ASM prevents fragmentation of disks, so you don’t need to manually relocate data to tune
I/O performance.

• Adding disks is straightforward—ASM automatically performs online disk reorganization
when you add or remove storage.

• ASM uses redundancy features available in intelligent storage arrays.

• The ASM storage system stores all types of database files.

• ASM makes your file management tasks easier, because you will be dealing with just a few
groups of disks, rather than a multitude of database files. ASM automatically creates the
database files and places them in appropriate disk groups.

• ASM does mirroring and striping, which in turn increases reliability and performance. You
can select different reliability and performance characteristics for various types of data. For
example, you can use fine-grained striping for redo log files and a coarser-grained striping
for regular data files.

• ASM is free!



ASM and Cluster Synchronization Service

An ASM storage system requires the use of an additional specialized database instance called ASM, which will actually manage the storage for a set of Oracle databases. In order to use ASM storage for your Oracle databases, you must first ensure that you have Oracle’s Cluster Synchronization Service (CSS) running on your databases.

CSS is responsible for synchronizing ASM instances and your database instances, and it is
installed as part of your Oracle software. CSS also synchronizes recovery from an ASM instance failure. You can find out if the CSS service is running by using the following command:

$ ps -ef | grep css
oracle 5506 1 1 Apr 11 ? 630:05 /u03/app/oracle/bin/ocssd.bin
oracle 12791 10525 2 16:38:39 pts/11 0:00 grep css
$

The preceding ps -ef output shows that the CSS service is indeed running. If you get the following result instead, it means that your CSS service hasn’t been started:

$ ps -ef | grep css
oracle 2207 19736 0 18:12:39 pts/6 0:00 grep css
$

What are the init parameters related to ASM?

• INSTANCE_TYPE: In an Oracle Database 10g database, you have two types of Oracle instances:RDBMS and ASM. RDBMS, of course, refers to the normal Oracle databases, and ASM refers to the new ASM instance. Set the INSTANCE_TYPE parameter to ASM. This will implicitly set the DB_UNIQUE_NAME parameter to +ASM.

• ASM_POWER_LIMIT: This is the maximum speed of this ASM instance during a rebalance disk operation. This operation redistributes the data files evenly and balances I/O load across the disks. The default is 1 and the range is from 1 to 11 (1 is slowest and 11 is fastest).

• ASM_DISKSTRING: This is the location where Oracle should look during a disk-discovery
process. The format of the disk string may vary according to your operating system. You
can specify a list of values as follows; this example limits the ASM discovery to disks whose
names end in s1 and s2 only:
ASM_DISKSTRING = '/dev/rdsk/*s1', '/dev/rdsk/*s2'

• ASM_DISKGROUPS: Here you specify the name of any disk group that you want to mount automatically at instance startup; the default value for this parameter is NULL

What is rebalancing (or) what is the use of ASM_POWER_LIMIT?

ASM_POWER_LIMIT is dynamic parameter, which will be useful for rebalancing the data across disks.
Value can be 1(lowest) to 11 (highest).

What are different types of redundancies in ASM & explain?

External redundancy,
Normal redundancy,
High redundancy.

I’m going to do add disks to my ASM diskgroup, how long will this rebalance take?

Rebalance time is heavily driven by the three items:
1) Amount of data currently in the diskgroup
2) IO bandwidth available on the server
3) ASM_POWER_LIMIT or Rebalance Power Level

What is stripping and mirroring.

Striping is spreading data across multiple disks so that IO is spread across multiple disks and hence increase in throughput. It provides read/write performance but fail over support.
ASM offers two types of striping, with the choice depending on the type of database file. Coarse striping uses a stripe size of 1MB, and you can use coarse striping for every file in your database, except for the control files, online redo log files, and flashback files. Fine striping uses a stripe size of 128KB. You can use fine striping for control files, online redo log files, and flashback files.

 Mirroring means redundancy. It may add performance benefit for read operations but overhead for write operations. It's basic purpose is to provide fail over support.
There are three ASM mirroring options:

High Redundancy - In this configuration, for each primary extent, there are two mirrored extents. For Oracle Database Appliance this means, during normal operations there would be three extents (one primary and two secondary) containing the same data, thus providing “high” level of protection. Since ASM distributes the partnering extents in a way that prevents all extents to be unable due to a component failure in the IO path, this configuration can sustain at least two simultaneous disk failures on Oracle Database Appliance (which should be rare but is possible).

Normal Redundancy - In this configuration, for each primary extent, there is one mirrored (secondary) extent. This configuration protects against at least one disk failure. Note that in the event a disk fails in this configuration, although there is typically no outage or data loss, the system operates in a vulnerable state, should a second disk fail while the old failed disk replacement has not completed. Many Oracle Database Appliance customers thus prefer the High Redundancy configuration to mitigate the lack of additional protection during this time.

External Redundancy - In this configuration there are only primary extents and no mirrored extents. This option is typically used in traditional non-appliance environments when the storage sub-system may have existing redundancy such as hardware mirroring or other types of third-party mirroring in place. Oracle Database Appliance does not support External Redundancy.8.  What is a diskgroup?
A disk group consists of multiple disks and is the fundamental object that ASM manages. Each disk group contains the metadata that is required for the management of space in the disk group. The ASM instance manages the metadata about the files in a Disk Group in the same way that a file system manages metadata about its files. However, the vast majority of I/O operations do not pass through the ASM instance. In a moment we will look at how file
I/O works with respect to the ASM instance.

ASM background processes

ASM rebalance master (RBAL) and ASM rebalance(ARBn). The RBAL process coordinates disk activity, and the ARBn processes perform the rebalancing work, which can include moving data extents.

In addition to ASM’s RBAL and ARBn, any Oracle database instance that uses ASM will have
two ASM-related background processes: RBAL and ASM background (ASMB). RBAL performs global opens of the disks that are part of the ASM disk group, and ASMB connects to the ASM instance as a foreground process and links the ASM instance and your database instance, sending information such as notifications when a data file is created or deleted, and when statistics are updated.


What are Diskgroup’s and Failuregroups?

Diskgroup is a terminology used for logical structure which holds the database files. Each Diskgroup consists of Disks/Raw devices where the files are actually stored. Any ASM file is completely contained within a single disk group. However, a disk group might contain files belonging to several databases and a single database can use files from multiple disk groups.
Failuregroups are used when using Normal/High Redundancy. They contain the mirrored ASM extents and must be containing different disks and preferably on separate disk controller.

Can ASM be used as replacement for RAID?

ASM is supposed to stripe the data and also mirror the data (if Using Normal, High Redundancy). So this can be used as a alternative for RAID 0+1 solutions

How does ASM provides Redundancy?

When you create a disk group, you specify an ASM disk group type based on one of the following three redundancy levels:
Normal for 2-way mirroring - When ASM allocates an extent for a normal redundancy file, ASM allocates a primary copy and a secondary copy. ASM chooses the disk on which to store the secondary copy in a different failure group other than the primary copy.
High for 3-way mirroring. In this case the extent is mirrored across 3 disks.
External to not use ASM mirroring. This is used if you are using Third party Redundancy mechanism like RAID, Storage arrays.

I am unable to open the ASM instance. What is the reason?

ASM instance does not have open stage. It has got only two options
Nomount- This starts the ASM instance
Mount- At this stage, Diskgroup defined in ASM_DISKGROUPS parameter are mounted
When you try to open the ASM instance , you get following error
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">SQL&gt; alter database open;
alter database open
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-15000: command disallowed by current instance type</span>

Can ASM instance and database (rdbms) be on different servers?

ASM instance and Database (rdbms) have to be present on same server. Otherwise it will not work.

Can we see the files stored in the ASM instance using standard unix commands.

No, you cannot see the files using standard unix commands like ls. You need to use utility called asmcmd to do this. This is present in 10.2 and above.e.g
/home/oracle>asmcmd
Asmcmd>
You can use help command to see the options.

What is ASMLIB?

ASMLIB is the support library for the ASM. ASMLIB allows an Oracle database using ASM more efficient and capable access to diskgroups. The purpose of ASMLIB, is to provide an alternative interface to identify and access block devices. Additionally, the ASMLIB API enables storage and operating system vendors to supply extended storage-related features.

What is SYSASM role?

Starting from Oracle 11g, SYSASM role can be used to administer the ASM instances. You can continue using SYSDBA role to connect to ASM but it will generate following warning messages at time of startup/shutdown, create Diskgroup/add disk ,etc
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Alert entry
WARNING: Deprecated privilege SYSDBA for command 'STARTUP'</span>

How can we copy the files from/to ASM?

You can use RMAN or DBMS_FILE_TRANSFER.COPY_FILE procedure to copy the files to/from ASM from/to Filesystem. Starting from Oracle 11g, you can use cp command in asmcmd to perform the same between ASM Diskgroups and also to OS Filesystem.

Is it mandatory to use disks of same size and characteristics for Diskgroups?

No, it is not mandatory to use the disks of same size and characteristics for Diskgroups though it is a Recommended Practice.
Same size disk for Failuregroups in Normal/High redundancy will prevent issues like ORA-15041 as the file extents needs to be mirrored across the disks. Also as Oracle distributes data based on capacity, so larger disk will have more data stored in it and which will result in higher I/O to disk and eventually can lead to sub-optimal performance.
Moreover having disks of different characteristic like varying disk speed can impact the performance.
When managing disks with different size and performance capabilities, best practice is to group them into disk groups according to their characteristics. So you can use higher speed disks for your database files while other disks can be part of Diskgroup used for Flash Recovery Area.

Do we need to install ASM and Oracle Database Software in different ORACLE_HOME?

No. Again installing ASM and Oracle Database Software in different ORACLE_HOME is not mandatory but a best practice. This is useful in cases when we need to have multiple databases using same ASM instance and you need to patch only one of them. E.g You need to apply a CBO patch to one of 10.2 database while your other 10.1 database using different installation does not require it. In this case having a ASM_HOME separate from 10.2 ORACLE_HOME will allow your 10.1 database to keep running. Thus this approach is useful for High Availability.

What is the maximum size of Disk supported by ASM?

ASM supports disks upto 2Tb, so you need to ensure that lun size should be less then 2Tb. 10.2.0.4 and 11g database will give error if you try to create a diskgroup with ASM disks having disk size >2Tb.

I have created Oracle database using DBCA and having a different home for ASM and Oracle 

Database. I see that listener is running from ASM_HOME. Is it correct?
This is fine. When using different home for ASM, you need to run the listener from ASM_HOME instead of ORACLE_HOME.