Cluster Ready Services and the OCR

Cluster Ready Services, or CRS, is a new feature for 10g RAC. Essentially, it is Oracle's own clusterware. On most platforms, Oracle supports vendor clusterware; in these cases, CRS interoperates with the vendor clusterware, providing high availability support and service and workload management. On Linux and Windows clusters, CRS serves as the sole clusterware. In all cases, CRS provides a standard cluster interface that is consistent across all
platforms.

CRS consists of four processes (crsd, occsd, evmd, and evmlogger) and two disks: the Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR), and the voting disk.

CRS manages the following resources:

* The ASM instances on each node
* Databases
* The instances on each node
* Oracle Services on each node
* The cluster nodes themselves, including the following processes, or "nodeapps":
o VIP
o GSD
o The listener
o The ONS daemon

CRS stores information about these resources in the OCR. If the information in the OCR for one of these resources becomes damaged or inconsistent, then CRS is no longer able to manage that resource. Fortunately, the OCR automatically backs itself up regularly and frequently.