CRS or ASM on Solaris / RAC
I wanted to pass on a tip to anyone doing ASM or CRS or both on Sun Solaris. When you install CRS, ASM, or both, you have to use raw devices. CRS needs the raw devices for the OCR and voting disks. ASM needs the raw devices so that it can control them and offer them in storage pools known as disk groups. Solaris uses a Virtual Table of Contents (VTOC) file that it uses to share devices between servers. When the disk is formatted by your Solaris SA, you need to make sure they do not use the first cylinder. Instead of using cylinder 0 to whatever, they need to use from cylinder 1 to whatever, leaving cylinder 0 alone. That way, when you dd the disks it will not cause the disks to “disappear”. My Solaris admin and I went through it about 4 times till we found the catch. The documentation on metalink is a little fuzzy so hopefully this helps some people out.
Also, with raw devices, I would suggest using an mknod command to label the disks so that it is much easier to support in the future.