Written by: ilmarkerm

Category: Blog entry

Published: January 1, 2015

Before storage device can be removed (or unassigned) from server, it must first be removed from Linux. This is even more necessary if the server is running Oracle ASMLib, because if there are any removed or read-only storage devices present when running service oracleasm scandisks, the command will just hang and server load will start to increase (maximum I’ve seen was 3500).

Here you find RedHat instructions on how to cleanly remove storage devices in RHEL6. A lot of steps, especially when running multipath and having multiple paths to each device.

Since we do database replication and cloning to test using storage replication, then assigning and unassigning storage devices from test servers is quite frequent and if not done properly and cleanly, we have to reboot the server. Here is a little script to help with that task. It takes ASMLib disk names to be removed as an argument, finds all paths to the device and removes them from Linux.

Tested in OEL5 (using RHEL kernel) and OEL6 (using UEK2 kernel). This script only deals with dm-* and sd* devices, so before using please check and modify the script for your environment. Before removing the storage devices from Linux, make sure that the disk groups are dismounted from ASM and they are not used.