ASM instance configuration and management

Staring with 10g R1 and onwards, Oracle supports two types of instances: RDBMS and ASM. An ASM instance is a special kind of instance with only Shared Global Area (SGA) that typically consists of memory components such as Shared Pool, Large Pool, Free Memory and ASM Cache, and a set of default background process, with some additional ASM-specific background processes. The ASM instance doesn't hold any physical structure and the name of the instance typically starts with +ASM. The instance would be generally named as +ASMn (where n represents the instance number) in a cluster environment. The INSTANCE_TYPE initialization parameter controls the role played by these two instances. The ASM instance configuration requires only a handful of initialization parameters. These parameters are discussed in the following section.

ASM instances efficiently support both non-RAC and RAC databases. Only one ASM instance is required per node, irrespective of the number...