Unable to create ASM disk under OEL 6.x

It was busy month and I'm behind with my blog posts. First of all Happy New Year to all of you and wish you all the best through the new year!

This is a short note for installing Oracle Database with ASM under Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.x, which is not certified YET!

If you are running ASM with ASMLib you may get the following error when try to create ASM disk:

[root@db-app2 ~]# oracleasm createdisk DISK01 /dev/mapper/data01
Writing disk header: done
Instantiating disk: failed
Clearing disk header: done

Writing the header on the disk fails without obvious reason. Well, it turned out that Security Linux was blocking the access to the disk. Because configuration of SELinux is not part of the startup configuration any more I just forgot it.

To disable the SELinux edit file /etc/selinux/config and configure SELINUX=disabled. Then reboot your system and run getenforce to confirm that SELinux is disabled:

[root@db-app2 ~]# /usr/sbin/getenforce
Disabled

The ASM disk is created successfully this time:

[root@db-app2 ~]# oracleasm createdisk DISK01 /dev/mapper/data01
Writing disk header: done
Instantiating disk: done

Regards,
Sve