RE: ASM crash/question

Hi Finn,  

Yes, by the CDE I mean the Common Desktop Environment.  

You are very likely correct in that something yanked the disks out from under ASM and immediately crashed all databases. However, having to crash the ASM instance doesn't give me a warm fuzzy.  

It appears the cde service did not cause the problem. I'm thinking it may have been a SAN hiccup.  

Thanks for your reply.  

From: Finn Jorgensen [mailto:finn.oracledba_at_gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 6:18 PM
To: Koivu, Lisa
Cc: oracle-l
Subject: Re: ASM crash/question  

Lisa,  

I'm thinking ASM got hung up first, which caused the other databases to crash since they could no longer access the files. The trick is to find out what caused ASM to get hung up. You mentioned not being able to log into CDE. Do you mean the Common Desktop Environment? If so, how is this maintenance mode associated with your databases and the server hosting them?  

Finn  

On 1/29/08, Koivu, Lisa <Lisa.Koivu_at_starwoodvo.com> wrote:

Hi All,  

I had several non-clustered databases crash simultaneously last week, all on the same host.  

The moments before the crash, I had mentioned to the sysadmin that I could not log in to the CDE. He said it had gone into maintenance mode. Once it was reset, all databases crashed and ASM hung up. (Has this happened to anyone before?)  

I could not restart the databases, as they could not see the datafiles in ASM.

I could not shut down ASM, as it thought databases were still connected.

I had to crash ASM with a shutdown abort (boy did that make me nervous)

Once I did that, ASM came up without an issue and so did all the databases.  

Oracle Support very rudely told me that if ASM doesn't have any databases communicating to it, or if it can't communicate with the databases it services, it will eventually time out and crash. This very curt and discourteous person informed me that "that's the way ASM works" and there was no documentation he could share with me to educate me on this issue.  

My point was that ASM is a service. Why would it just die when nothing was connected? What if just one database had crashed and couldn't come up? I'd then have to crash the other databases this ASM instance services in order to bring the crashed database up. This will fly like a box of rocks when I ask to put this into production.  

I was also appalled at how rude this person from support was. I actually hope I get an email inviting me to "please take a survey" because I would actually fill one out this time. (It was all I could do to not tell him he was being a jerk about the whole thing.)  

If anyone has encountered this scenario, is willing to educate me, or can direct me to any documentation, etc. I would greatly appreciate it.  

Lisa Koivu

Oracle Database Administrator

desk: 407-903-4691

cell: 954-683-4459  

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