Oracle GI 11.2.0.2.0, standalone server, no cluster no RAC
Oracle Linux 5.6 x-64
Building a new sandbox system under VBox to mimic one of my production servers. Have done this many times before, and currently have a total of 7 other VM's on my Win7 Pro desktop. (not all running concurrently)
It has been my habit in the past that when shutting down one of these machines I don't bother shutting down the db's or ASM instance, I just have vbox send and ACPI shutdown. Of course that causes the systems to have a shutdown abort, but for my purposes that has never caused an issue. I would NOT do that on a live system.
With this system I decided to start doing that the right way. I got the ASM instance built (still no databsases), added a second DG with two failgroups, modified a few init parms to more closely align with the live system. Shutdown and startup from sqlplus works fine. But when I shutdown the ASM instance and then send the machine an ACPI shutdown, the next time I start the machine, the ASM instance will not restart. Instead I get
oracle:+ASM$ sqlplus / as sysasm
SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.2.0 Production on Fri Sep 27 13:09:26 2013
Copyright (c) 1982, 2010, Oracle. All rights reserved.
Connected to an idle instance.
SQL> startup
ORA-01078: failure in processing system parameters
ORA-29701: unable to connect to Cluster Synchronization Service
SQL>
It appears "has" started ok - if I try to start it manually, it tells me it is already active, and as a side observation, it did automatically start the listener.
As a side note that may or may not bear on this, the spfile is not on the ASM disk, but is in $ORACLE_HOME/dbs. This is how the live system is configured.
Am willing to do some digging, but need some direction.