How is the voting disk used by Oracle Clusterware?
The voting disk is accessed exclusively by CSS (one of the Oracle Clusterware daemons). This is totally different from a database file. The database looks at the database files and interacts with the CSS daemon (at a significantly higher level conceptually than any notion of “voting disk”). “Non-synchronized access” (i.e. database corruption) is prevented by ensuring that the remote node is down before reassigning its locks. The voting disk, network, and the control file are used to determine when a remote node is down, in different, parallel, indepdendent ways that allow each to provide additional protection compared to the other. The algorithms used for each of these three things are quite different. As far as voting disks are concerned, a node must be able to access strictly more than half of the voting disks at any time. So if you want to be able to tolerate a failure of n voting disks, you must have at least 2n+1 configured. (n=1 means 3 voting disks). You can configure up to 32 v
