Oracle Database 11g Oracle Real Application Clusters Handbook, 2nd Edition, 2nd Edition

Administering the Voting Disk

Oracle Clusterware uses a voting disk to resolve cluster membership issues in the event of partitioned clusters. Consider an eight-node cluster experiencing a breakdown in communication between the nodes—four nodes cannot communicate with the other four nodes. Situations like this can cause serious data integrity issues. A voting disk or a quorum disk provides a mechanism to resolve such issues. In case of a break in communication and a partitioned cluster, a voting disk helps in deciding which set of nodes should survive if another set of nodes should go down.

All voting disks must be placed on shared storage to be accessible by all the nodes. A voting disk is a small file if you are using a raw device for it; a ...