Requirements for Creating an Oracle Grid Infrastructure Home Directory

Requirements for Creating an Oracle Grid Infrastructure Home Directory

During installation, you are prompted to provide a path to a home directory to store Oracle Grid Infrastructure software. Ensure that the directory path you provide meets the following requirements:

• It should be created in a path outside existing Oracle homes, including Oracle Clusterware homes.

• It should not be located in a user home directory.

• It should be created either as a subdirectory in a path where all files can be owned by root, or in a unique path.

• If you create the path before installation, then it should be owned by the installation owner of Oracle Grid Infrastructure (typically oracle for a single installation owner for all Oracle software, or grid for role-based Oracle installation owners), and set to 775 permissions.

Oracle recommends that you install Oracle Grid Infrastructure on local homes, rather than using a shared home on shared storage.

For installations with Oracle Grid Infrastructure only, Oracle recommends that you create a path compliant with Oracle Optimal Flexible Architecture (OFA) guidelines, so that Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) can select that directory during installation. For OUI to recognize the path as an Oracle software path, it must be in the form u0[1-9]/app.

When OUI finds an OFA-compliant path, it creates the Oracle Grid Infrastructure and Oracle Inventory (oraInventory) directories for you.

To create an Oracle Grid Infrastructure path manually, ensure that it is in a separate path, not under an existing Oracle base path. For example:

# mkdir -p  /u01/app/11.2.0/grid
# chown grid:oinstall /u01/app/11.2.0/grid
# chmod -R 775 /u01/app/11.2.0/grid

With this path, if the installation owner is named grid, then by default OUI creates the following path for the Grid home:

/u01/app/11.2.0/grid

Create an Oracle base path for database installations, owned by the Oracle Database installation owner account. The OFA path for an Oracle base is/u01/app/user, where user is the name of the Oracle software installation owner account. For example, use the following commands to create an Oracle base for the database installation owner account oracle:

# mkdir -p  /u01/app/oracle
# chown -R oracle:oinstall /u01/app/oracle
# chmod -R 775 /u01/app/oracle

Note:

If you choose to create an Oracle Grid Infrastructure home manually, then do not create the Oracle Grid Infrastructure home for a cluster under either the grid installation owner Oracle base or the Oracle Database installation owner Oracle base. Creating an Oracle Clusterware installation in an Oracle base directory will cause succeeding Oracle installations to fail.

Oracle Grid Infrastructure homes can be placed in a local home on servers, even if your existing Oracle Clusterware home from a prior release is in a shared location.

Homes for Oracle Grid Infrastructure for a standalone server (Oracle Restart) can be under Oracle base. Refer to Oracle Database Installation Guide for your platform for more information about Oracle Restart.