Can The ASM Disk Header and Disk Group Be Renamed?

Question

I have a requirement to mount multiple SAN clones (EMC Symclone) of a production ASM instance on the same development server. RMAN is too slow to be an option, unless I find a white paper explaining any way to make RMAN perform a clone faster than the SAN.
The default response is normally, "Do your clone to dedicated hardware." However, that answer is not an option for obvious financial reasons, especially since I am working with a RAC environment with ~10 development and test environments.
The only way to do this (that I can think of) is to rename the disk header and probably the disk group prior to making it available to the ASM instance.
I have heard that Oracle has come up with an undocumented solution for one or more businesses. I believe it has something to do with the kfed library located in $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib.
Has anyone out there managed to do this? If so, can you share your solution or point me in the right direction?
I know I am not the only one out there looking for a solution to this issue...
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This is absolutely possible. Can be done via kfed. I never found the answer searching the net and had to figure it out. Here it is in hopes that it helps someone else. DISCLAIMER.... If you screw up your disks don't blame me. If you have any questions about this you can email me: [email protected]
The procedure is basically this:
- compile kfed
- dump the disk header with kfed
- Modify the dump file
- write the dump back to the disk header.
** Changing ANYTHING other than the diskgroup name will render your disks useless.
Here is a script to do the work for you:
for file in `ls /dev/vx/rdsk/as1_pccdw/asmdata*`
do
echo "Processing DATA disk $file ..."
search=ASCDW_DATA
replace=AS1CDW_DATA
newlength=`echo $replace | wc -m`
let newlength=$newlength-1
shortname=`echo $file | cut -f 6 -d /`
kfed op=read dev=$file | sed -e '24,24s/ '$search' / '$replace' /' -e '24,24s/length=.*/length='$newlength'/' > /tmp/$shortname.kfed
kfed op=write dev=$file text=/tmp/$shortname.kfed CHKSUM=YES
done
for file in `ls /dev/vx/rdsk/as1_pccdw/asmredo*`
do
echo "Processing REDO disk $file ..."
search=ASCDW_REDO
replace=AS1CDW_REDO
newlength=`echo $replace | wc -m`
let newlength=$newlength-1
shortname=`echo $file | cut -f 6 -d /`
kfed op=read dev=$file | sed -e '24,24s/ '$search' / '$replace' /' -e '24,24s/length=.*/length='$newlength'/' > /tmp/$shortname.kfed
kfed op=write dev=$file text=/tmp/$shortname.kfed CHKSUM=YES
done
Edited by: user4630111 on Nov 10, 2008 6:03 PM