About Backing Up and Recovering Voting Disks

The voting disk records node membership information. A node must be able to access more than half of the voting disks at any time. To avoid simultaneous loss of multiple voting disks, each voting disk should be on a storage device that does not share any components (controller, interconnect, and so on) with the storage devices used for the other voting disks.

For example, if you have five voting disks configured, then a node must be able to access at least three of the voting disks at any time. If a node cannot access the minimum required number of voting disks it is evicted, or removed, from the cluster. After the cause of the failure has been corrected and access to the voting disks has been restored, you can instruct Oracle Clusterware to recover the failed node and restore it to the cluster.

This section contains the following topics:

• Backing Up Voting Disks

• Recovering Voting Disks

If you lose all copies of the voting disk and do not have a backup, the only safe way to re-create the voting disk is to reinstall Oracle Clusterware. Having a backup of the voting disk can drastically simplify the recovery of your system.