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The Daily Insight

What is the use of ASM in Oracle?

Author

Robert Guerrero

Updated on March 11, 2026

ASM is Oracle's recommended storage management solution that provides an alternative to conventional volume managers, file systems, and raw devices. ASM uses disk groups to store datafiles; an ASM disk group is a collection of disks that ASM manages as a unit.

Similarly, you may ask, what is ASM in Oracle Database?

Automatic Storage Management (ASM) is an integrated, high-performance database file system and disk manager. ASM eliminates the need for you to directly manage potentially thousands of Oracle database files. ASM groups the disks in your storage system into one or more disk groups.

Also Know, how does ASM communicate with database? The database communicates with ASM instance using the ASMB (umblicus process) process. Once the database obtains the necessary extents from extent map, all database IO going forward is processed through by the database processes, bypassing ASM. Thus we say ASM is not really in the IO path.

Subsequently, one may also ask, how does ASM work in Oracle?

ASM exposes a file system interface for Oracle database files. The content of files that are stored in a disk group is evenly distributed to eliminate hot spots and to provide uniform performance across the disks. The performance is comparable to the performance of raw devices.

How do I bring down an ASM instance?

The Oracle ASM shutdown process is initiated when you run the SHUTDOWN command in SQL*Plus. Before you run this command, ensure that the ORACLE_SID environment variable is set to the Oracle ASM SID so that you can connect to the local Oracle ASM instance.

Related Question Answers

Why is ASM needed?

ASM reduces the administrative overhead for managing database storage by consolidating data storage into a small number of disk groups. This enables you to consolidate the storage for multiple databases and to provide for improved I/O performance.

How do I know if my ASM is running?

Type "help [command]" to get help on a specific ASMCMD command. The lsdsk command can be used to display the disk paths for all ASM disks. It utilizes the dynamic performance view v$asm_disk respectively gv$asm_disk in a clustered environment if the ASM instance is up and running.

What means ASM?

Additional Surveillance Measure

How do I connect to ASM?

To connect to an ASM instance with SQL*Plus, set the ORACLE_SID environment variable to the ASM SID. The default ASM SID for a single-instance database is +ASM , and the default SID for ASM for an Oracle RAC node is +ASM node_number where node_number is the number of the node.

How do I start an ASM?

Startup the Oracle ASM instance
  1. Set the default Oracle_home environment variable to grid home where ASM is installed. EXPORT ORACLE_HOME=/up1/grid/12.2.0/dbhome_1.
  2. Connect with sqlplus. SQLPLUS / as sysasm.
  3. Start up the Oracle ASM Instance. SQL> STARTUP.
  4. Check the spfile location or otherwise set it with.

What is ASM power limit?

The asm_power_limit parameter is the maximum power for a rebalancing operation on an ASM instance, with powers ranging from 1 (low) to 11 (high). The higher the "power", the faster an ASM rebuild operation will occur. It is the number of parallel relocations for disk rebalancing.

What is failure group in ASM Oracle?

Failure groups are used to store mirror copies of data. When Oracle ASM allocates an extent for a normal redundancy file, Oracle ASM allocates a primary copy and a secondary copy. A failure group is a subset of the disks in a disk group, which could fail at the same time because they share hardware.

How do I increase my ASM disk size?

The RESIZE clause of ALTER DISKGROUP enables you to resize disks in a disk group. All disks in the disk group must be of equal size. If you do not specify a new size in the SIZE clause, then Oracle ASM uses the size of the disks as returned by the operating system.

What is ASM job?

Primary job responsibilities of an area sales manager would include: Managing, training and motivating existing sales team to drive revenue growth. Develop and manage efficient distribution networks for sales. Monitoring sales team performance, analyzing sales data, periodical forecasting and reporting to zonal heads.

Where is my ASM disk path?

To identify the underlying physical device that the ASM disk point to, you can use the oracleasm querydisk command. The querydisk option will list the major and minor numbers that can be used to match the physical device.

What is ASM Diskgroup?

Automatic Storage Management (ASM) is an integrated, high-performance database file system and disk manager. ASM eliminates the need for you to directly manage potentially thousands of Oracle database files. ASM groups the disks in your storage system into one or more disk groups.

How do you stop ASM rebalance?

For disk groups that have COMPATIBLE. ASM set to less than 11.2. 0.2, the operational range of values is 0 to 11 inclusive. Specifying 0 for the POWER in the ALTER DISKGROUP REBALANCE command will stop the current rebalance operation (unless you hit bug 7257618).

How do I find the size of my ASM disk?

ASM Disk group size Check
  1. select name, total_mb, free_mb, usable_file_mb,
  2. round(((total_mb-nvl(free_mb,0))/total_mb)*100,0) percent_used.
  3. from V$ASM_DISKGROUP_STAT;
  4. SELECT G.NAME,
  5. sum(b. total_mb) total_mb,
  6. sum((b. total_mb - b. free_mb)) used_mb,
  7. sum(B. FREE_MB) free_mb,
  8. decode(sum(b. total_mb),0,0,(ROUND((1- (sum(b. free_mb) / sum(b.

What is ASM redundancy?

With external redundancy, ASM does not provide any redundancy for the disk group. In external redundancy, the underlying disks in the disk group must provide redundancy (for example, using a RAID storage array.) The redundancy level or type is specified at the time of creating the disk groups.

How do I create a Diskgroup in ASM?

Creating diskgroups

Using DBCA is extremely simple; the DBA must enter a name, a redundancy option, and choose the disks that will be part of the ASM diskgroup. DISK 'ORCL:DATA1', 'ORDL:DATA2'; This command will create a diskgroup called DATA that contains the disks marked DATA1 and DATA2 by ASMlib.

How do I check my ASM instance status?

Verify the ASM setup
  1. Change to the Oracle Clusterware/Grid Infrastructure home directory: For Oracle RAC 10g Release 2/Oracle RAC 11g Release 1: # cd $CRS_HOME/bin.
  2. Verify the status of ASM on all the nodes in the cluster: # ./srvctl status asm ASM instance +ASM1 is running on node galaxy.

What is striping and mirroring in ASM?

ASM striping is the process of dividing a file into 1 MB extents and spreading the extents evenly across all disks in the disk group. ASM automatically distributes ASM files across disks in an ASM diskgroup using file extents. An allocation unit is the smallest contiguous disk space that ASM allocates.

What happen if you miss sign while adding Datafile in ASM disk group?

If you miss the '+' sign, there will be several scenarios: db_create_file_dest is set and points to ASM (i.e: +DATA): The database will take 'DATA' as an alias and will create ASM file on the destination associated with the 'DATA' alias that will be located at the ASM +DATA root directory.

What is ASM Linux?

Introduction. Automatic Storage Management (ASM) simplifies administration of Oracle related files by allowing the administrator to reference disk groups rather than individual disks and files, which ASM manages internally. On Linux, ASM is capable of referencing disks as raw devices or by using the ASMLib software.

How do you stop ASM in Srvctl?

If you have Oracle RAC or Oracle Database installed, then you cannot use SRVCTL in the database home to manage Oracle ASM. You cannot use this command when OCR is stored in Oracle ASM because it will not stop Oracle ASM. To stop Oracle ASM you must shut down Oracle Clusterware.

How do you stop ASM in standalone?

In this case to stop ASM instance, follow below procedure. SQL> alter diskgroup all dismount; –> This will dismount all DG on this instance.

How do I add LUN to ASM Diskgroup?

Adding new disk to ASM diskgroup
  1. First, create the disk using ASMLIB.
  2. Check the visibility of the disks at OS level:( as grid owner from all the nodes) dd if=/dev/oracleasm/disks/DATA02 of=/dev/null count=100 bs=8192.
  3. Use kfed to read the disks:(as grid owner from all the nodes) kfed read /dev/oracleasm/disks/DATA02.

How do I delete files from ASM Diskgroup?

Just make sure your SID is set properly and type asmcmd from the command line. In there you can cd, ls, pwd and rm to remove ASM files and directories. Check out this article on using asmcmd commands. You can use the alter diskgroup and drop diskgroup to remove ordinary ASM disk groups.