Oracle ASM, Netweaver 7.3

[Former Member]

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/f0774cd8-03dd-2d10-0897-8ca1ffc38...

Page 16,

*-Raw device installations are no longer supported*

I want Expert Comments on this.

Thanks

SM

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Raw device is also known as the raw partition. It is not mounted and written via any operating system such as unix, windows or linux. It is only mounted by Oracle itself. You may store Oracle data files on raw partitions. From technical point of view, it has faster access than an OS partition. So your statement says that Oracle Raw partition is not supported, by SAP. You can use an OS partition in order to store your Oracle datafiles.

I hope that I clarified the issue.

Best regards,

Orkun Gedik

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

What do you think the reason behind this.

From DBA point of view, ASM is an additional overhead, do you know how much it costs for the license?

Thanks

SM

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

>> From DBA point of view, ASM is an additional overhead, do you know how much it costs for the license?

From DBA point of view, you are correct. From SAP perspective, ASM is already included into the Oracle license. At least, our license and my customers do not pay any additional cost for the ASM. In order to get detail, you should consider this issue with your local SAP office.

Best regards,

Orkun Gedik

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Yes, having an ASM instance does mean some overhead, but maybe this is mostly a one-time effect. Think of all the benefits you get from ASM over raw devices. Espescially the added flexibility and manageability sound promising. You have the performance of raw devices with ASM, but not all these restrictions. On a demo system I installed a RAC 11g with ASM, and it worked fine. I haven't seen many Oracle instances with raw devices so far, so there must be a reason why raw devices were avoided in the past. So nothing important is lost when raw devices are discontinued.

[fidel_vales]

Also keep in mind that in Oracle 12G Raw Devices will not be supported either. So it is "logical" for SAP start earlier

[Former Member]

I doesn't make much sense to support both raw devices and ASM. Since ASM is the go forward approach from Oracle, the raw device support is discontinued/obsoleted. So far I haven't heard of any advantage of raw devices over ASM disks. (I have to admit that I haven't seen any real life ASM instance yet.) The decision sounds reasonable to me.