OCR / Vote disk Maintenance Operations: (ADD/REMOVE/REPLACE/MOVE) (Doc ID 428681.1)

Last updated on FEBRUARY 06, 2024

Applies to:

Oracle Database Cloud Schema Service - Version N/A and later
Gen 1 Exadata Cloud at Customer (Oracle Exadata Database Cloud Machine) - Version N/A and later
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure - Database Service - Version N/A and later
Oracle Database Cloud Exadata Service - Version N/A and later
Oracle Database Exadata Express Cloud Service - Version N/A and later
Information in this document applies to any platform.

Goal

The goal of this note is to provide steps to add, remove, replace or move an Oracle Cluster Repository (OCR) and/or Voting Disk in Oracle Clusterware 10gR2, 11gR1 and 11gR2 environment. It will also provide steps to move OCR / voting and ASM devices from raw device to block device. For Oracle Clusterware 12c, please refer to <Document 1558920.1> Software Patch Level and 12c Grid Infrastructure OCR Backup/Restore.

This article is intended for DBA and Support Engineers who need to modify, or move OCR and voting disks files, customers who have an existing clustered environment deployed on a storage array and might want to migrate to a new storage array with minimal downtime.

Typically, one would simply cp or dd the files once the new storage has been presented to the hosts. In this case, it is a little more difficult because:

1. The Oracle Clusterware has the OCR and voting disks open and is actively using them. (Both primary and mirrors)
2. There is an API provided for this function (ocrconfig and crsctl), which is the appropriate interface than typical cp and/or dd commands.

It is highly recommended to take a backup of the voting disk, and OCR device before making any changes.

Note: while the OCR and Voting disk files may be stored together, such as in OCFS (for example in pre-11.2 Clusterware environments) or in the same ASM diskgroup (for example in 11.2 Oracle Clusterware environments), OCR and Voting disk files are in fact two separate files or entities and so if the intention is to modify or move both OCR and Voting disk files, then one must follow steps provided for both of these types of files.