Ok, I’ve worked for a small company for 15 years and we have valued running Standard Edition in a RAC configuration during that time But as most of you know, RAC is no longer included in 19c Standard Edition. Dang!
Patching is very important at my company and we have applied every quarterly patch in the last 7 years. RAC was great for this since we could patch in rolling mode and keep the database up.
We've investigated and we simply can’t afford the upgrade to EE+RAC option.
So I need to plan conversion to single node databases and this is the source of my question. Oracle Grid Infrastructure and ASM was required when deploying SE2 RAC. I really had no major issues administering GI so I'm not biased against it.
However now that I will only have single node databases, I am seriously considering not using GI and simply using Linux LVM to manage the disks underneath my data file and recovery mount points. ASM disk groups will be replaced by LVM volume groups. All our disks are LUNs from our SAN with all the RAID redundancy I need. I never used any of the advanced features of ASM like mirroring or failure groups.
My main reason for dropping GI is to reduce complexity and because each quarter’s patch will now cause downtime, no GI home means no delays in stopping and starting the GI. I found this to take at least 5 minutes on stop and another 5 on start in my experience patching.
So all of this leads to my question:
If I ditch GI / ASM in favor of Linux LVM what features am I really going to miss? Will I have any regrets?