Could not find ASM spfile

Question

Hello,
I was unable to locate the spfile of my ASM instance.
Re:
I just did a complete reinstall and my suspicion that it might had something to do with removing the first datagroup was correct:
SQL> show parameter pfile
NAME                         TYPE      VALUE
spfile                         string      +DATA/asm/asmparameterfile/registry.253.729008643Now I wonder if this is new to release 2, and if this is actually a good idea, having the spfile in a ASM group rather than in the dbs directory.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi Markus,
yes this is new to 11gR2.
And yes it does make sense. Because up to 11.2 if you only used ASM (no shared filesystem) you could not have spfile for ASM just pfiles.
This leads to the problem that your ASM instances can diverge (if you only update 1 file).
Hence Oracle wanted to have the spfile for ASM in a central place.
Since there is no other shared filesystem than ASM, they put it into ASM.
However in the GPnP file, the OLR (Oracle Local Registry) and the OCR (Oracle Cluster Registry) they have the entries to identify the DISCOVERY String and the spfile location.
So ASM can startup but will then access the SPFILE on the ASM diskgroup.
If you need to move the spfile, you can use spcopy command from asmcmd.
In an Oracle Restart environment, someone can argue if this makes sense, if it would not have been easier to put it simply into the filesystem.
However since Oracle Restart is just the clusterware in single instance, they probably did not fix the standard functionality....
Sebastian