Multiple  Oracle  Home  Installation  Guide  for  Oracle®  10g 

(10.2.0.3) on Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 4 Update 5 x86_64 
  The  purpose  of  this  document  is  to  provide  a  procedure  for  installing  a  multiple  Oracle  Home  for 
Oracle 10g (10.2.0.3) RAC on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4 Update 5 x86_64. 
 
ASM Installation – Best Practices

Keep the following in mind when installing ASM

• When running more than one database instance on a single server or node, it is
recommended that you install ASM in its own Oracle home on that server or node. This
is advisable even if you are running only one database instance but plan to add one or
more database instances to the server or node in the future.

With separate Oracle homes, you can upgrade and patch ASM and databases
independently, and you can deinstall database software without impacting the ASM
instance.

If an ASM instance does not already exist and you select the OUI option to install and
configure ASM only, OUI installs ASM in its own Oracle home.

• If you are running a single database instance on a server or node and have no plans to
add one or more database instances to this server or node, ASM and the database can
share a single Oracle home.

Deploying Oracle Database with separate ASM Home and Database Home

The following section provides the detailed steps on how to configure multiple Oracle Homes for
ASM and Oracle instances [i.e. we will have Automatic Storage Management (ASM) instance
running in one Oracle Home and Database instance running in another one].

A. OS Groups and Users setup

B. Tasks to be completed before Oracle Home Installations
C. ASM Oracle Home Installation
D. Database Oracle Home Installation
E. ASM instance setup in ASM Oracle Home
F. Database instance setup in Database Oracle Home
 G. Verification and validation

A. OS Groups and Users Setup

The OS groups and their description are as given below –

i. oinstall - owner of oracle inventory

ii. asmdba - osdba group for ASM Oracle Home
iii. dba - osdba group for Database Oracle Home

Note: Make sure that GID for the above OS groups is uniform across all nodes in the cluster.

The OS users and their description are as given below –

1. oracleasm - owner of ASM Oracle Home. Member of oinstall, amsdba

groups
2. oracle - owner of Database Oracle Home. Member of oinstall, dba,
asmdba groups

Note: The following points should be considered for providing permissions for above OS users.

• The oracle user for Database instance (oracle) needs to be a member of the dba group
for the ASM instance (asmdba).
• ASM oracle user (oracleasm) does not need to be in the dba group for the DB instance
(dba).
• Also all ASM disks must have read/write permission to the ASM dba group.
 B. Tasks to be completed before Oracle Home Installations

Complete the following steps before starting the ASM and Database Oracle Home installations

• Make entry for oracle and oracleasm users in the /etc/hosts.equiv file for public, private
and public nodes. Below is an example of the /etc/hosts.equiv entries-

node1.dell.com oracle
node2.dell.com oracle
pnode1.dell.com oracle
pnode2.dell.com oracle
vnode1.dell.com oracle
vnode2.dell.com oracle
node1.dell.com oracleasm
node2.dell.com oracleasm
pnode1.dell.com oracleasm
pnode2.dell.com oracleasm
vnode1.dell.com oracleasm
vnode2.dell.com oracleasm
• Change permissions for ASM disks to oracleasm:asmdba
• Create Oracle Base and Oracle Homes for ASM Oracle Home and Database Oracle
Home as shown below.

Oracle Base : /opt/oracle

ASM Oracle Home : /opt/oracle/product/10.2.0/asm_1

Database Oracle Home : /opt/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1

• Change ownership and permissions for ASM Oracle Home as shown below.

chown –R oracleasm:asmdba /opt/oracle/product/10.2.0/asm_1

chmod 775 /opt/oracle/product/10.2.0/asm_1

• Change ownership and permissions for Database Oracle Home as shown below.

chown –R oracleasm:asmdba /opt/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1

chmod 775 /opt/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1

• Create the OraInventory directory and set the permissions for that as shown below.

OraInventory location : /opt/oracle/oraInventory

chown –R oracleasm:asmdba /opt/oracle/oraInventory

chmod 775 /opt/oracle/oraInventory

C. ASM Oracle Home Installation

1. As root user, type:

xhost +

2. Login as oracleasm user and set the Oracle Home as /opt/oracle/product/10.2.0/asm_1

3. Start Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) by running runIstaller from the staging area.

4. In the Specify Home Details window in the Path field, verify that the complete Oracle
home path is
/opt/oracle/product/10.2.0/asm_1 and click Next.

5. In the privileged Operating System Groups window, provide the OSDBA and OSOPER
group as ‘asmdba’

6. Run the root.sh script as per the instruction to complete the installation.

D. Database Oracle Home Installation

1. Login as oracle user and set the Oracle Home as /opt/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1

2. Start Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) by running runIstaller from the staging area.

3. In the Specify Home Details window in the Path field, verify that the complete Oracle
home path is
a. /opt/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1 and click Next.

4. In the privileged Operating System Groups window, provide the OSDBA and OSOPER
group as ‘dba’
5. Run the root.sh script as per the instruction to complete the installation. Please note that
while running root.sh, it recognizes the CSS daemon which was started during the
previous root.sh script execution and hence it does not perform any additional actions.

ASM and database instances can be created after the installations of above two Oracle
Homes.
E. ASM Instance Setup in ASM Oracle Home

1. Invoke DBCA from the ASM Oracle Home (i.e. /opt/oracle/product/10.2.0/asm_1)

2. In Select Storage Mechanism screen select “Use ASM as the storage for this database”.

3. Clicking on the Next button, will create the ASM instance and prompts for creation of
disk groups. Specify the disks you want to add to the disk group.

4. Once the disk group is created and the ASM instance is up and running, go through the
rest of the steps of DBCA and at the end, select “Save as a Database Template”. Please
note that do not choose “Create Database” at the end, because the database will be
created from the database Oracle Home.

F. Database Instance Setup in Database Oracle Home

1. Invoke DBCA from database Oracle Home (i.e. /opt/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1)

2. Provide Global Database name and SID as appropriate.

3. Choose ASM as storage for database.

4. When you click on Next, DBCA discovers that ASM instance is already up and running
and it shows up the diskgroup created in the previous section.

5. Go through the rest of the steps of DBCA and start choose to “Create Database” at the
end.

G. Verification and validation of the setup

You can check the status of Oracle instances, use and verify the following command and
output.

[oracle@node1 ~]$ ps –ef | grep pmon

oracleasm 19958 1 0 14:01 ? 00:00:00 asm_pmon_+ASM

oracle 20004 1 0 14:45 ? 00:00:00 ora_pmon_testdb

As shown above, +ASM instance is running under oracleasm user and testdb database is
running under oracle user.
Also you can login to ASM instance and check that testdb as a client for ASM instance. The
following command and output validate the same

SQL> select * from v$asm_client;

INSTANCE_NAME DB_NAME STATUS

testdb test_db connected