

OS user oracle is the owner of both GI home and Database home. In this article, I will demonstrate configuration of Oracle ASMFD in a standalone environment.Ĭurrently, I have Oracle ASMLIB configured on my standalone system. This will remove Oracle ASMLIB and Oracle ASM devices will be configured to use Oracle ASMFD. If you have an existing Oracle ASM library driver (Oracle ASMLIB) configuration, and you want to employ ASMFD, you would need to configure Oracle ASMFD. In case ASM disks have been configured on disk partitions, the filter protects the area on the disk managed by Oracle ASMFD, assuming the partition table is left untouched by the user.īesides, Oracle ASMFD eliminates the need to rebind disk devices used with Oracle ASM each time the system is restarted. Thus it helps to prevent users, including those with administrative privileges, from inadvertently overwriting Oracle ASM disks, thereby preventing corruption of the data stored on ASM disk(s) within the disk group(s).

using dd command) are not committed to ASM disks. Any write I/O requests that are not issued by Oracle software (e.g. ASMFD uses the filter driver to validate write I/O requests to Oracle ASM disks. Oracle ASMFD is a kernel module that resides in the I/O path of the Oracle ASM disks. ASMFD is currently available only on the Linux operating system and can be completely managed by the ASMCMD command Line interface. It is intended to overcome the limitations mentioned earlier and replace traditional ASMLIB. With Oracle Grid Infrastructure release 12.1.0.2, Oracle has introduced a new component called Oracle Automatic Storage Management Filter Driver (Oracle ASMFD) which is installed with an Oracle Grid Infrastructure installation. This led to compromising the security of data as well as accidental corruption of the data in the ASM disks and ASM disks themselves.

The ASM disks were owned by GI home owner and both the owner and any users belonging to an operating system group designated as the OSASM group could read from and write to ASM disks using OS commands like strings, echo, dd etc. There were serious limitations to this method.

Prior to Oracle Grid Infrastructure (GI) release 12.1.0.2, ASM Library (ASMLIB) was the only method to access storage devices by means of ASM Disks and Diskgroups. Oracle Automatic Storage Management Filter Driver (Oracle ASMFD) - Simple Talk
