Installing Linux packages for oracle ASM installation

I have been playing around with ASM quite often now a day. The thing that confused quite a lot while installing ASM was the pre installations tasks. You need several Linux packages before you can start the Universal Installer.

What needs to be understood is that when you use ASM as your storage type for database, the operating system does not have any control over the disks that are being used. The packages which are required to be installed basically help Linux mark those disks as Oracle ASM disks. You can generally relate this to a File System for better understanding and packages help to build that file system. So here is what you need to install and how you can do it using Yum.

• oracleasm
• oracleasm-support
• oracleasm-lib

You are not required to install the first package if you are using the latest version of oracle linux. It is built into the Linux Kernel. To install the second one you can use the following command.

yum install oracleasm-support

The third package is not yet available in Yum repositories and you will have to download this from oracle's website separately. You can download it from here and save it to disk. Once saved, navigate to the directory where you have saved and issue the following command.

rpm -Uvh oracleasmlib-2.0.4-1.el6.i686.rpm