Grid Infrastructure 12c: Recovering the GRID Disk Group and recreating the GIMR

Losing the Disk Group that contains OCR and voting files has always been a challenge. It requires you to take regular backups of OCR, spfile and diskgroup metadata.

Since Oracle 12cR1, there are a few additional components you must take care of:

– The ASM password file (if you have Flex ASM it can be quite critical)

– The Grid Infrastructure Management Repository

Why ASM password file is important? Well, you can read this good blog post form my colleague Robert Bialek: http://blog.trivadis.com/b/robertbialek/archive/2014/10/26/are-you-using-oracle-12c-flex-asm-if-yes-do-you-have-asm-password-file-backup.aspx

So the problem here, is not whether you should back them up or not, but how you can restore them quickly.

Assumptions: you back up regularly:

ASM parameter  file:

Oracle Cluster Registry:

ASM Diskgroup Metadata:

ASM password file:

What about the GIMR?

According to the MOS Note: FAQ: 12c Grid Infrastructure Management Repository (GIMR) (Doc ID 1568402.1), there is no such need for the moment.

Weird, huh? The -MGMTDB itself contains for the moment just the Cluster Health Monitor repository, but expect to see its important increasing with the next versions of Oracle Grid Infrastructure.

If you REALLY want to back it up (even if not fundamental, it is not a bad idea, after all), you can do it.

The -MGMTDB is in noarchivelog by default. You need to either put it in archivelog mode (and set a recovery area, etc etc) or back it up while it is mounted.

Because the Cluster Health Monitor (ora.crf)  depends on it, you have to stop it beforehand:

Then you can operate with -MGMTDB:

Now, imagine that you loose the GRID diskgroup (nowadays, with the ASM Filter Driver, it’s more complex to corrupt a device by mistake, but let’s assume that you do it):

The cluster will not start anymore, you need to disable the crs, reboot and start it in exclusive mode:

 

Then you can recreate the GRID disk group and restore everything inside it:

Finally, the last missing component: the GIMR.

You can recreate it or restore it (if you backed it up at some point in time).

Let’s see how to recreate it:

Conclusion

Recovering from a lost Disk Group / Cluster is not rocket science. Just practice it every now and then. If you do not have a test RAC, you can build your lab on your laptop using the RAC Attack instructions. If you want to test all the scenarios, the RAC SIG webcast: Oracle 11g Clusterware failure scenarios with practical demonstrations by Kamran Agayev is the best starting point, IMHO. Just keep in mind that Flex ASM and the GIMR add more complexity.

HTH

Ludovico

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Ludovico

Principal Product Manager at Oracle
Ludovico is a member of the Oracle Database High Availability (HA), Scalability & Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) Product Management team in Oracle. He focuses on Oracle Data Guard, Flashback technologies, and Cloud MAA.

3 thoughts on “Grid Infrastructure 12c: Recovering the GRID Disk Group and recreating the GIMR

  1. Pingback: Grid Infrastructure 12c: Recovering the GRID Disk Group and recreating the GIMR - Ludovico Caldara - Blogs - triBLOG

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