Preparing Oracle Automatic Storage Management

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Ensure that you have your environment set up to protect your Oracle ASM data with IBM® Storage Protect Snapshot.

Before you begin

Redundancy level is defined when the ASM disk group is created, and can be normal, high, or external. For more information about ASM disk group redundancies, see the Oracle product documentation. IBM Storage Protect Snapshot supports all three redundancy types.

Procedure

  1. Define the storage devices in the IBM Storage Protect Snapshot profile with the DEVICE_CLASS profile parameter. The definitions must specify that IBM Storage Protect Snapshot selects the storage cluster for the current operation.

    For an ASM disk group with normal redundancy, the backup completes even if one of the failure groups is not located on the storage device. For an ASM disk group with high redundancy, the backup completes even if two of the failure groups are not located on the storage device.

  2. Create the ASM disk groups. If you already created the ASM disk groups, verify that they meet the following criteria.
    • For an ASM backup, create a disk group on the backup system to host an Oracle control file. This disk group has the same name as the disk group where the control file is on the production system. During a backup operation, the Oracle control file is stored in the IBM Storage Protect Snapshot repository directory on the production server.
    • For ASM cloning, ensure that the ASM disk groups are on supported storage systems, otherwise the cloning operation fails.
    • Do not run any queries or operations on the Oracle database and ASM instance on the clone system while IBM Storage Protect Snapshot clone operations are running.
  3. During the offload operation, the control file is transferred into a temporary directory within ACS_DIR on the backup server by IBM Storage Protect Snapshot. RMAN restores the control file into the locations that are specified within the database profile from this location as part of the offload operation.
  4. IBM Storage Protect Snapshot must have an Oracle recovery catalog database available when you back up data. This recovery catalog must be present regardless of the type of backup. Typically one ASM instance can serve multiple databases.

    IBM Storage Protect Snapshot supports this setup when dedicated disk groups are used for each database. For normal-redundancy disk groups and high-redundancy disk groups, IBM Storage Protect Snapshot handles failure groups by allowing backups of disk groups that are on supported storage systems.

  5. If needed, you can change the redundancy level and add failure groups after a restore operation. IBM Storage Protect Snapshot does not re-create failure groups when a restore operation completes.
  6. Export Oracle specific environment variables for the ASM instance and paths, such as ORACLE_HOME.
    Type in one of these commands to verify that the variables are available:

    su - oracle_user -c

    For ksh or bash, enter the following command with root user ID su - oracle_user -c env | grep ORA

  7. Export Oracle Grid specific environment variables for the ASM instance and paths, such as ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_SID.
    Type in one of these commands to verify that the variables are available:

    su - grid_user -c

    su - grid_user -c env | grep ORA