Oracle ACFS autostart on Oracle RAC stand alone (Oracle Restart)

I would like to start with a declaration – I would prefer not to use ACFS for a stand-alone system. It binds the “normal” order of startup and mounts to the cluster. Not only that – but while until version 12.1, RAC stand alone had a built-in service for ACFS, this is no longer the case for 12.2 and above. This resource/service exists only for a two (and above) node clusters.

If you have upgraded from a 12.1 (or 11.2) stand alone RAC to 12.2 or above, you will no longer be able to automatically mount your ACFS disks. This (and some minor bugs I’ve found with ACFS) is part of the reason I would recommend against using ACFS for stand alone system. HOWEVER – there are cases where you have no choice – either because you are using ACFS replication/snapshots, or because you are using Oracle ASM redundancy model (using either “normal” or “high” redundancy) over a JBoD – which forces you to use ADVM and with it – ACFS is only a small addition.

As I’ve written before – ACFS won’t auto start on 12.2 stand alone GI. A possible solution I thought of (but did not apply, and thus – cannot show it here) is to use a method of creating a 3rd party application service (as described in a document called “TWP-Oracle-Clusterware-3rd-party” to implement a custom service which will actually mount your ACFS for you, when the cluster is ready to do so. I would have done it like that in a recent project, however, a nice person called Pierre has done it for me, slightly differently – he used a systemd services to run custom scripts which attempted to run in loop until the cluster was ready to perform the required actions. I have tested it, and it works well. My only comment about it, which you will be able to see in his blog post, was that if your ORACLE_HOME resides on a dedicated mount point (which is my case, usually), you should force your systemd unit to require this mount as well as its prerequisites. Other than that – his solution worked well, and I thank him for his time and efforts. Kudos Pierre!