Kamran Agayev's Oracle Blog

While installing Oracle Database after Oracle Grid Infrastructure installation, I was supposed to get the list of all nodes where I need to install Oracle Software (11gR2 – 11.2.0.4). But instead, I got nothing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I checked the status of the clusterware, it was up and running on both nodes:

[oracle@node1 bin]$ ./olsnodes
node1
node2
[oracle@node1 bin]$ ./crsctl check crs
CRS-4638: Oracle High Availability Services is online
CRS-4537: Cluster Ready Services is online
CRS-4529: Cluster Synchronization Services is online
CRS-4533: Event Manager is online

 

Then I checked the inventor.xml file and found out that the CRS=true is missing.

[oracle@node1 bin]$ cat /etc/oraInst.loc | grep inventory_loc
inventory_loc=/u01/app/oraInventory

[oracle@node1 bin] cd /u01/app/oraInventory/ContentsXML/

[oracle@node1 bin] more inventory.xml

<output trimmed ————— >

<HOME NAME=”Ora11g_gridinfrahome1″ LOC=”/u01/app/product/11.2.0.3/grid” TYPE=”O” IDX=”1″>

</output trimmed ————->

After running the following command, I updated the inventory.xml file and node list appeared

[oracle@node1 ~]$ cd /u01/app/product/11.2.0.3/grid/oui/bin/
[oracle@node1 bin]$ ./runInstaller -updateNodeList ORACLE_HOME=”/u01/app/product/11.2.0.3/grid” CRS=true
Starting Oracle Universal Installer…

Checking swap space: must be greater than 500 MB. Actual 3919 MB Passed
The inventory pointer is located at /etc/oraInst.loc
The inventory is located at /u01/app/oraInventory
‘UpdateNodeList’ was successful.

 

[oracle@node1 bin] more inventory.xml

<HOME NAME=”Ora11g_gridinfrahome1″ LOC=”/u01/app/product/11.2.0.3/grid” TYPE=”O” IDX=”1″ CRS=”true”>

 

While installing OEL on VirtualBox I got the following error:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a little research I solved the problem by chaning IDE for CDROM from “IDE Slave Master” to “IDE Primary Master”

Today, while importing one database to another, my colleague (Turkel) got a tablespace issue despite the fact that he used REMAP_TABLESPACE for almost all available tablespaces of the source database. After investigating, we saw that there’re a lot of users that was assigned a default tablespace which was deleted afterwards. While importing data, the user was supposed to be created and deleted tablespace was assigned as a default tablespace

For this, make sure you get distinct account of default tablespaces of all users and change it during import using REMAP_TABLESPACE parameter

I said it before. It was only once that I succeeded to install Oracle Clusterware without any issues and that was during OCM exam I didn’t hit any bug, I didn’t re-configured anything. The installation went smooth. But …

Today, I got all following errors :

ORA-15032: not all alterations performed
ORA-15131: block of file in diskgroup could not be read
ORA-15018: diskgroup cannot be created
ORA-15031: disk specification ‘/dev/mapper/mpathh’ matches no disks
ORA-15025: could not open disk “/dev/mapper/mpathh”
ORA-15056: additional error message
ORA-15017: diskgroup “OCR_MIRROR” cannot be mounted
ORA-15063: ASM discovered an insufficient number of disks for diskgroup “OCR_MIRROR”
ORA-15033: disk ‘/dev/mapper/mpathh’ belongs to diskgroup “OCR_MIRROR”

In the beginning, while installing Oracle 11gRAC, I got the following error:

CRS-2672: Attempting to start ‘ora.diskmon’ on ‘vsme_ora1’

CRS-2676: Start of ‘ora.diskmon’ on ‘vsme_ora1’ succeeded

CRS-2676: Start of ‘ora.cssd’ on ‘vsme_ora1’ succeeded

 

Disk Group OCR_MIRROR creation failed with the following message:

ORA-15018: diskgroup cannot be created

ORA-15031: disk specification ‘/dev/mapper/mpathh’ matches no disks

ORA-15025: could not open disk “/dev/mapper/mpathh”

ORA-15056: additional error message

 

 

Configuration of ASM … failed

see asmca logs at /home/oracle/app/cfgtoollogs/asmca for details

Did not succssfully configure and start ASM at /home/oracle/11.2.4/grid1/crs/install/crsconfig_lib.pm line 6912.

/home/oracle/11.2.4/grid1/perl/bin/perl -I/home/oracle/11.2.4/grid1/perl/lib -I/home/oracle/11.2.4/grid1/crs/install /home/oracle/11.2.4/grid1/crs/install/rootcrs.pl execution failed

 

Bad news is that the installation failed. Good news is that I can easily restart the installation again without any issues, as the root.sh script is rest restartable. If you don’t need to install the software on all nodes again, solve the problem and run root.sh script again. If the problem is solved, it will sun smoothly. If you need to install the software on all nodes, you have to deconfigure and run the installation again. To remove the failed RAC installation, run rootcrs.pl script on all nodes except the last one, as follows:

$GRID_HOME/crs/install/rootcrs.pl -verbose -deconfig –force

 

Run the following command on the last node:

$GRID_HOME/crs/install/rootcrs.pl -verbose -deconfig –force –lastnode

 

Now, run ./runInstaller command and start the installation again.

 

So let’s go back to the problem. It was claiming that “disk specification ‘/dev/mapper/mpathh’ matches no disks”. Hmm … The first thing that came in my mind was permission of the disk. So I checked it, it was root:disk. I changed it to oracle:dba and run root.sh script. Got the same problem again.

I checked the following log file:

/home/oracle/app/cfgtoollogs/asmca

 

[main] [ 2014-12-09 17:26:29.220 AZT ] [UsmcaLogger.logInfo:143]  CREATE DISKGROUP SQL: CREATE DISKGROUP OCR_MIRROR EXTERNAL REDUNDANCY  DISK ‘/dev/mapper/mpathh’ ATTRIBUTE ‘compatible.asm’=’11.2.0.0.0′,’au_size’=’1M’

[main] [ 2014-12-09 17:26:29.295 AZT ] [SQLEngine.done:2189]  Done called

[main] [ 2014-12-09 17:26:29.296 AZT ] [UsmcaLogger.logException:173]  SEVERE:method oracle.sysman.assistants.usmca.backend.USMDiskG

roupManager:createDiskGroups

[main] [ 2014-12-09 17:26:29.296 AZT ] [UsmcaLogger.logException:174]  ORA-15018: diskgroup cannot be created

ORA-15031: disk specification ‘/dev/mapper/mpathh’ matches no disks

ORA-15025: could not open disk “/dev/mapper/mpathh”

ORA-15056: additional error message

 

Oracle  wasn’t able to create the diskgroup claiming that the specified device matches no disks. I logged in to the ASM instance and tried to create the diskgroup by my own:

SQL> CREATE DISKGROUP OCR_MIRROR EXTERNAL REDUNDANCY  DISK ‘/dev/mapper/mpathh’ ATTRIBUTE ‘compatible.asm’=’11.2.0.0.0′,’au_size’=’1M’;

 

SQL> CREATE DISKGROUP OCR_MIRROR EXTERNAL REDUNDANCY  DISK ‘/dev/mapper/mpathh’ ATTRIBUTE ‘compatible.asm’=’11.2.0.0.0′,’au_size’=’1M’

ERROR at line 1:

ORA-15018: diskgroup cannot be created

ORA-15031: disk specification ‘/dev/mapper/mpathh’ matches no disks

ORA-15025: could not open disk “/dev/mapper/mpathh”

ORA-15056: additional error message

Linux-x86_64 Error: 13: Permission denied

Additional information: 42

Additional information: -807671168

 

I checked the permission, it was root:disk . I changed it to oracle:dba and run the command again.

SQL> CREATE DISKGROUP OCR_MIRROR EXTERNAL REDUNDANCY  DISK ‘/dev/mapper/mpathh’ ATTRIBUTE ‘compatible.asm’=’11.2.0.0.0′,’au_size’=’1M’

ERROR at line 1:

ORA-15018: diskgroup cannot be created

ORA-15017: diskgroup “OCR_MIRROR” cannot be mounted

ORA-15063: ASM discovered an insufficient number of disks for diskgroup “OCR_MIRROR”

 

I run the query again, this time got different message:

SQL> CREATE DISKGROUP OCR_MIRROR EXTERNAL REDUNDANCY  DISK ‘/dev/mapper/mpathh’ ATTRIBUTE ‘compatible.asm’=’11.2.0.0.0′,’au_size’=’1M’

ERROR at line 1:

ORA-15018: diskgroup cannot be created

ORA-15033: disk ‘/dev/mapper/mpathh’ belongs to diskgroup “OCR_MIRROR”

 

 

I tried to mount the diskgroup and got the following error:

SQL> alter diskgroup ocr_mirror mount;

alter diskgroup ocr_mirror mount

*

ERROR at line 1:

ORA-15032: not all alterations performed

ORA-15017: diskgroup “OCR_MIRROR” cannot be mounted

ORA-15063: ASM discovered an insufficient number of disks for diskgroup “OCR_MIRROR”

 

I checked the permission. It was changed again! I changed it back to oracle:dba and tried to mount the diskgroup and got the following error!

SQL> alter diskgroup ocr_mirror mount

ERROR at line 1:

ORA-15032: not all alterations performed

ORA-15131: block  of file  in diskgroup  could not be read

 

Ohhh … Come on! I logged to the ASM instance, and queried the v$asm_disk and v$asm_diskgroup views.

SQL> select count(1) from v$asm_disk;

   COUNT(1)

———-

         0

 

I changed permission to oracle:dba and run the query again:

SQL> /

  COUNT(1)

———-

         1

 

I run again:

 

SQL> select count(1) from v$asm_diskgroup;

   COUNT(1)

———-

         0

 

What??? The permission is changed automatically while I query V$ASM_DISKGROUP view? Yes … Even, when you query V$ASM_DISKGROUP, Oracle checks ASM_DISKSTRING parameter and query the header of all disks that are listed in that parameter. For more information on this topic, you can check my following blog post:

V$ASM_DISKGROUP displays information from the header of ASM disks

So, this means that when I query V$ASM_DISK view, Oracle scan the disk (with the process that runs under root user) and change the permission of the disk.

After making change to the /etc/udev/rules.d/99-oracle-asmdevices.rules file and adding the following line, the problem solved:

NAME=”/dev/mapper/mpathh”, OWNER=”oracle”, GROUP=”dba”, MODE=”0660″

 

So I checked the permission of the disks again after querying V$ASM_DISK multiple time, and made sure that it doesn’t change the permission of the disk and run root.sh script. Everything worked fine and I got the following output:

ASM created and started successfully.

Disk Group OCR_MIRROR mounted successfully.

clscfg: -install mode specified

Successfully accumulated necessary OCR keys.

Creating OCR keys for user ‘root’, privgrp ‘root’..

Operation successful.

CRS-4256: Updating the profile

Successful addition of voting disk 5feed4cb66df4f43bf334c3a8d73af92.

Successfully replaced voting disk group with +OCR_MIRROR.

CRS-4256: Updating the profile

CRS-4266: Voting file(s) successfully replaced

##  STATE    File Universal Id                File Name Disk group

—  —–    —————–                ——— ———

 1. ONLINE   5feed4cb66df4f43bf334c3a8d73af92 (/dev/mapper/mpathh) [OCR_MIRROR]

Located 1 voting disk(s).

CRS-2672: Attempting to start ‘ora.asm’ on ‘vsme_ora1’

CRS-2676: Start of ‘ora.asm’ on ‘vsme_ora1’ succeeded

CRS-2672: Attempting to start ‘ora.OCR_MIRROR.dg’ on ‘vsme_ora1’

CRS-2676: Start of ‘ora.OCR_MIRROR.dg’ on ‘vsme_ora1’ succeeded

Preparing packages for installation…

cvuqdisk-1.0.9-1

Configure Oracle Grid Infrastructure for a Cluster … succeeded

 

 

After returning home from LAD Tour, I would like to share some of my experience on my first ever trip to Argentina and Uruguay. First of all, it was a very long journey It took me 26 hours to get to Buenos Aires (Baku->Istanbul->Sao Paolo->Buenos Aires) and it was really a long flight! Once I arrived in Buenos Aires and exited an airport, the first thing what I felt was cold :), because the weather was chilly. I took a shuttle directly to hotel. In the morning, I got up early and took a wonderful tour to the Tigre.  The trip was phenomenal and I had a great time. Tigre is special when you are in the islands, 500 river and streams, and threre are not any street, or bridges. An incredible place is the Rio De La Plata with 40 miles in width and their new islands.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I came back to the hotel at 3 PM. On the first of my stay I was having a jetlag and I felt sleepy at 4PM (It was 12AM midnight in Azerbaijan, Baku ) and woke up at 2AM (It was 10AM in Baku) and couldn’t sleep till the morning. For the rest 4 hours I prepared for my presentations, had a breakfast and went straight to San Andre University which was a few blocks from the hotel. I met Marcelo Ochoa (an Oracle ACE from Argentina) in the lobby, who was one of the organizers of the conference. Together with Gustavo Gonzalez (ACE Director) Afterwards, I met Hans Forbrich and Michele Malcher in the speakers room. In a few minutes the conference started and all attendees gathered in the auditorium. After 15 minutes of the introduction, I was invited to delivery my speech. I was very lucky to make a first presentation of the event in front of the participants that were gathered to listen the introduction before me and stayed there :). The lecture theater was completely packed and I was very excited that so many people were listening my presentaiton

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I talked about my RAC investigation and discussed real-life solutions on some “Oracle RAC How-to” scenarios. Then Hans Forbrich talked about Oracle VM. Once his speech was finished, my strong interest emerged in his field of research and consequently I made up a decision to use VM in real life. I also delivered my second presentation in 3 hours after my initial speech. My second speech of the presentation was dedicated to “Success story of migrating Oracle 10g single node to Oracle 11gR2 RAC environment in AzerCell”. After my second half of the presentation all the participants were invited to attend a lunch in the dining hall. Some of the participants approached me in order to introduce themselves and to ask questions about my presentation. During the launch we had very lovely conversation. The launch followed by seminar of practical RAC simulation – RacAttack! And this simulation was attended by 15+ participant and all of them brought their laptop to install Oracle 12c 2 node RAC. I noticed that most of them were using 2G or 4G RAM and this caused difficulties in installing RAC, nevertheless, the rest of the participants installed Grid Infrastructure successfully.

So the first day was over. Unfortunately, due to continuing jetlag at that time, I was forced to miss the speakers’ dinner. Next day, I attended 2 sessions of Mike Dietrich about Pluggable Databases and Oracle Upgrade. Both of the sessions were outstanding in the quality of delivery and the content! Then I left the conference and took a City Tour. I was fascinated by Buenos Aires and its tempestuous history.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Being a BJJ (Brazilan Jiu Jitsu) practitioner, I have been trained in different countries and thus try to learn various techniques from different BJJ schools. This time I called Sebastian Munoz from Gracie Humaita school and took a private and public class. Both classes were awesome. I learned a lot of different techniques, rolled with professor and students.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was very tired, returned back to the hotel and on the following morning packed for Montevideo trip. When I arrived to the Argentina Airlilnes (it was very cold!) I met Hans, Michele and Mike. I bought my tickets and thanks to Hans, we had some rest in the Star Alliance VIP Lounge Ezeiza.

The flight to Montevideo wasn’t too far. After 55 minutes, we landed. Nelson Calero (President of Uruguay Oracle User Group) and Edelweiss (Oracle ACE) were already there, they picked up us at the airport to the hotel. Then we went out to have a wonderful lunch, did a city tour and returned back to the hotel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The following day, the conference has started. It was a few blocks far from the hotel, in the ORT University. Both my sessions were after the midday, and there were plenty of participants. In the first session I talked about RAC Best Practices, while in the second session I presented “Oracle RAC failure test cases”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the presentation was finished, I had a short discussion with participants, afterwards I decided to go to the Gracie Humaita Montevideo gym and took a class from them. Once I entered the gym, I noticed the generous kindness of the students of this JitJitsu school. Everybody was friendly to me. Master De Souza introduced us to different techniques. Then I rolled with them a little and went to join to the dinner with the speakers. The dinner was awesome and very delicious. Once the dinner was over, we returned back to the hotel and I slept.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next day, we did a RacAttack with 30+ participants! That was the most interesting RacAttack I’ve ever done in my professional career. I wasn’t expecting such a huge number of participants, and almost all of them had different kind of problems with the installation and configuration. With the great support and guidance of Michele, Hans and Nelson, we resolved essentially most of the problems and therefore most of the participants were finally able to install Grid Control. The entire session lasted for 8 hours and it was exciting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, I would like to underline the fact that both events were very well planned, professionally organized  and went extremely well. After travelling 60 hours, presenting 4 sessions and organizing 2 RacAttack events for 50+ attendees, joining 3 different BJJ (Brasilian Jiu JItsu) classes, provided me with a unique and great opportunity to make new friends, and get to know good experts in my field. I also enjoyed getting an exposure to new culture and traditions.

I would like express my deep appreciation and gratitude to the organizers, to OTN, to ACE Team and especially to Francisco Munoz Alvarez for creating such great tours and helping us to share our knowledge. Thanks to Nelson Calera, Edelwiss for their hospitality. I truly appreciate the time they spent with us. It’s nice to know that you are surrounded by such lovely people

 

 

Today, while starting RAC instances of 2 node RAC database (10gR2 on Linux), I got the following error in the first node:

ORA-01105: mount is incompatible with mounts by other instances
ORA-01677: standby file name convert parameters differ from other instance

 

I checked the alert.log file, but there was no enough information to solve this issue:

Wed Jul 30 09:58:48 AZST 2014
Setting recovery target incarnation to 2
ORA-1105 signalled during: ALTER DATABASE MOUNT…
Wed Jul 30 09:58:58 AZST 2014
SUCCESS: diskgroup DATA was dismounted

 

After playing with some initialization parameters, I found a metalink note where it was defined as a bug (bug13001004)

Check out the following metalink note:

Spfile defined in OCR is not used if one exists in $ORACLE_HOME/dbs (Doc ID 1373622.1)

 

The solution is – to move parameter file to the centralized directory (/ocfs) and remove any instance_name parameter

Just came across a wonderful blog where you can find dozens of different Oracle related video tutorials

www.OracleVideoTutorials.com

As you’ve already known, you should use odd number of disks for voting disk. A node must be able to strictly access more than half of the voting disks at any time. Let me show you how it works. I have installed and configured two node 11gR3 RAC on VirtualBox and use the following case to show how it works:

– Create a diskgroup with 3 failure groups and 3 different disks

– Move voting disk to the new diskgroup. Shutdown the second node and deattach one of the disks. In this case, cluster should start as it can access more than half of the voting disks (2 from 3)

– Start the second node. The cluster should be up. Shut the second node again and deattach the second voting disk. And start it. The cluster will not start. Check the ocssd.log file

– Shut down all node, attach the previous disks and start it again. Cluster will be up

Here’re the detailed steps:

– Create a diskgroup :

– Mount the diskgroup at the second node:

SQL> ALTER DISKGROUP vdisk MOUNT;

 

– Replace voting disk, move it to the new diskgroup and query the voting disk:

– 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

– Shutdown the second instance and reattach one of the disks of VDISK diskgroup :

 

–

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

– Star the second node, query the Voting disk and check if the clusterware is up:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

– Shutdown the second node again, remove the second disk from the Voting diskgroup and start the node:

 

 

 

 

 

 

– Check the log file at $GRID_HOME/log/node2/cssd/ocssd.log :

2014-05-29 01:51:23.055: [ CSSD][2946955008]clssnmvVerifyCommittedConfigVFs: Insufficient voting files found, found 1 of 3 configured, needed 2 voting files
2014-05-29 01:51:23.055: [ CSSD][2946955008](:CSSNM00020:)clssnmvVerifyCommittedConfigVFs: voting file 0, id 279c162c-1b964f88-bfb1d622-aecc9e4e not found
2014-05-29 01:51:23.055: [ CSSD][2946955008](:CSSNM00020:)clssnmvVerifyCommittedConfigVFs: voting file 1, id 7e282f3f-5e514f42-bfb79396-c69fda76 not found
2014-05-29 01:51:23.055: [ CSSD][2946955008](:CSSNM00021:)clssnmCompleteVFDiscovery: Found 1 voting files, but 2 are required. Terminating due to insufficient configured voting files

– As you see, cluster is down. Now, shutdown both nodes, add disks to the second node and check the status of the clusterware:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It took me some time to investigate why CRSCTL REPLACE VOTEDISK command is not working.
[oracle@node1 ~]$ crsctl replace votedisk VDISK
CRS-4264: The operation could not be validated
CRS-4000: Command Replace failed, or completed with errors.
When you get an error during VOTEDISK replacement, make sure you check the following items:

– Make sure the disk group you’re moving the voting disk is mounted on all nodes.

– Make sure the compatibility parameter is set to the version of Grid software you’re using. You can change it using the following command:

alter diskgroup VDISK set attribute ‘compatible.asm’=’11.2’;

Query V$ASM_DISKGROUP view to make sure it’s the same with the rest disk groups and with the version of the Grid Software:

select group_number, name, compatibility, database_compatibility from v$asm_diskgroup;

– Check alert.log file of an ASM instance, any available trace file of the ASM instance. Check /var/log/messages file and trace the replace command usint strace file. See if you can catch any error from the log file:

[grid@node5 ~]strace crsctl replace votedisk VDISK
– Make sure you’ve an odd number of votedisk

– Make sure there’s enough space in the diskgroup

– Make sure disk permissions is correct

– Make sure you’re running the command using Grid Software owner

Today, all above mentioned checks are failed :). In my case, the problem was using incorrect “crsctl” command. After upgrading the RAC environment from 11.2.0 to 11.2.3 I was still using old crsctl (by accident, forgot to set environment variables correctly). But no need to worries, it was a test database.

Let me know if you have any additional check to investigate voting disk replace failure

Cheers

One of the reason of why cluster won’t start is DIAGNOSTIC_DEST folder is missing. Here it is what I got today in of the nodes of the RAC environment:

db-bash: crs_stat -t

HA Resource Target State
———– —— —–
error connecting to CRSD at [(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=IPC)(KEY=ora_crsqs))] clsccon 184

 

While checking alert log file of the clusterware ($GRID_HOME/log/node1/alertnode1.log

[/home/oracle/11.2.0/grid_1124/bin/oraagent.bin(4745)]CRS-5011:Check of resource “+ASM” failed: details at “(:CLSN00006:)” in “/home/oracle/11.2.0/grid_1124/log/node01/agent/ohasd/oraagent_oracle/oraagent_oracle.log”

 

ASM instance failed to start. I connected to ASM instance and tried to start it manually:

db-bash-$ asm

SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.4.0 Production on Mon Mar 3 10:32:24 2014

Copyright (c) 1982, 2013, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

Connected to an idle instance.

ASM> startup

ORA-48108: invalid value given for the diagnostic_dest init.ora parameter

ORA-48140: the specified ADR Base directory does not exist [/home/oracle/11.2.0/dbhome]

ORA-48187: specified directory does not exist

HPUX-ia64 Error: 2: No such file or directory

Additional information: 1

ASM>

 

ADR Base Directory is missing. After creating it, I successfully started the CRS and got the happiest message :

db-bash-$ crsctl check crs
CRS-4638: Oracle High Availability Services is online
CRS-4537: Cluster Ready Services is online
CRS-4529: Cluster Synchronization Services is online
CRS-4533: Event Manager is online
db-bash-$