ODA X6-2M – How to create your own ACFS file system

In this post I will explain how to create your own ACFS file system (on the command line) that you can use to (temporarily) store data.

So you have this brand new ODA X6-2M and need to create or migrate some databases to it. Thus you need space to store data to import into the new databases you will create.  Or for some other reason. The ODA X6-2M comes with lots of space in the form of (at least) two 3.2 TB NVMe disks. But those have been formatted to ASM disks when you executed the odacli create-appliance command, or when you used the GUI to deploy the ODA.

If you opted for “External Backups” most of the disk space will have been allocated to the +DATA ASM diskgroup. Or in the +RECO diskgroup.

Thus you need to decide which diskgroup you will use to create an ACFS file system on. Since we have 80% of space allocated to +DATA I decided to use some of that.

Logon to your ODA as root and make a mount point that you will use:

as root:
mkdir /migration

Then su to user grid and set the ASM environment:

su - grid
. oraenv
[+ASM1] <press enter>

The command below will use asmca to create a volume called migration on the ASM DiskGroup +DATA with initial allocation of 50 GB.

asmca -silent -createVolume -volumeName migration -volumeDiskGroup DATA -volumeSizeGB 50

Then you need to find the name of the volume you created in order to create an ACFS file system on it:

asmcmd volinfo -G DATA migration | grep -oE '/dev/asm/.*'

Let’s assume that the above command returned:

/dev/asm/migration-46

Then you can use the following command to create an ACFS file system on that volume and mount it on /migration:

asmca -silent -createACFS -acfsVolumeDevice /dev/asm/migration-46 -acfsMountPoint /migration

Next you need to run the generated script as an privileged user (aka root), which is the message you get when executing the previous step:

/u01/app/grid/cfgtoollogs/asmca/scripts/acfs_script.sh

To check the system for the newly created file system use:

df -h /migration

To get the details of the created file system use:

acfsutil info fs /migration

Or to just check the autoresize parameter, autoresizemax or autoresizeincrement use:

/sbin/acfsutil info fs -o autoresize /migration
/sbin/acfsutil info fs -o autoresizemax /migration
/sbin/acfsutil info fs -o autoresizeincrement /migration

To set the autoresize on with an increment of 10GB:

/sbin/acfsutil size -a 10G /migration

And to verify that it worked as expected:

acfsutil info fs /migration
acfsutil info fs -o autoresize /migration

To use the file system as the oracle user you might want to set the permissions and ownership:

ls -sla /migration
chown oracle:oinstall /migration
chmod 775 /migration
ls -sla /migration

And you are good to go!

Of course you can also use the GUI to do this, then just start asmca as the grid user without the parameters and follow similar steps but then in the GUI.

HTH – Patrick