I think I may need some help getting the storage for my ASM right. I changed companies recently and the new place is a Windows house so the Oracle databases are all on 2008 R2 machines. I have run Oracle RAC on both physical and virtual before, but only in Linux/Unix environments (which so far I still prefer) so I'm still learning some of the ins and outs. This company is also looking at moving to RAC, so ASM is in the mix. To begin my testing, I have set up an ASM instance for a single host which will eventually become a development hub holding several databases. However, even before I've set up any databases, the host is locking up. I suspect it has something to do with the disk configuration in that while the lock ups have occurred while the vm is idling, several lock-ups have happened when I try to drop a disk from within the asmca utility. I followed the documentation that Oracle provided for Windows platforms, but this documentation of course does not offer insight into storage virtualization on vmware.
Here is my configuration:
VMware: vSphere 5.5
OS: Windows 2008 R2 Standard
Memory: 12G
Storage: OS: 60G; ASM: 20G, 5G, 5G
Oracle Grid: 11.2.0.4 (plus January 2014 CPU)
Oracle Database: 11.2.0.4 (plus January 2014 CPU)
Other details (maybe important, maybe not):
1) I have a large pages enabled
2) Disks are thin-provisioned. As a side-note, I've always thick-provisioned my ASM disks, but our Sr. IT admin has made a policy that all disks are to be thin-provisioned for efficiency. I'm not sure if this could cause an issue.
3) The 3 ASM disks are running using the Paravirtualized SCSI driver
4) The host also has an OEM 12c Agent installed and running.
I'm new to the Windows platform when it comes to Oracle (I've administered plenty of SQL Server DBs), but the lockups don't appear to be generating any kind of data to any logs.