Oracle Clusterware - Voting Disk

What is a voting disk?
A voting disk is a file that manages information about node membership.

What are the administrative tasks involved with voting disk?
Following administrative tasks are performed with the voting disk :
1) Backing up voting disks
2) Recovering Voting disks
3) Adding voting disks
4) Deleting voting disks
5) Moving voting disks

How do we backup voting disks?
1) Oracle recommends that you back up your voting disk after the initial cluster creation and after we complete any node addition or deletion procedures.
2) First, as root user, stop Oracle Clusterware (with the crsctl stop crs command) on all nodes. Then, determine the current voting disk by issuing the following command:
crsctl query votedisk css
3) Then, issue the dd or ocopy command to back up a voting disk, as appropriate.

Give the syntax of backing up voting disks:-
On Linux or UNIX systems:
dd if=voting_disk_name of=backup_file_name
where,
voting_disk_name is the name of the active voting disk
backup_file_name is the name of the file to which we want to back up the voting disk contents
On Windows systems, use the ocopy command:
ocopy voting_disk_name backup_file_name

What is the Oracle Recommendation for backing up voting disk?
Oracle recommends us to use the dd command to backup the voting disk with aminimum block size of 4KB.

How do you restore a voting disk?
To restore the backup of your voting disk, issue the dd or ocopy command for Linux and UNIX systems or ocopy for Windows systems respectively.
On Linux or UNIX systems:
dd if=backup_file_name of=voting_disk_name
On Windows systems, use the ocopy command:
ocopy backup_file_name voting_disk_name
where,
backup_file_name is the name of the voting disk backup file
voting_disk_name is the name of the active voting disk

How can we add and remove multiple voting disks?
If we have multiple voting disks, then we can remove the voting disks and add them back into our environment using the following commands, where path is the complete path of the location where the voting disk resides:
crsctl delete css votedisk path
crsctl add css votedisk path

How do we stop Oracle Clusterware?When do we stop it?
Before making any modification to the voting disk, as root user, stop Oracle Clusterware using the crsctl stop crs command on all nodes.

How do we add voting disk?
To add a voting disk, issue the following command as the root user, replacing the path variable with the fully qualified path name for the voting disk we want to add:
crsctl add css votedisk path -force

How do we move voting disks?
To move a voting disk, issue the following commands as the root user, replacing the path variable with the fully qualified path name for the voting disk we want to move:
crsctl delete css votedisk path -force
crsctl add css votedisk path -force

How do we remove voting disks?
To remove a voting disk, issue the following command as the root user, replacing the path variable with the fully qualified path name for the voting disk we want to remove:
crsctl delete css votedisk path -force

What should we do after modifying voting disks?
After modifying the voting disk, restart Oracle Clusterware using the crsctl start crs command on all nodes, and verify the voting disk location using the following command:
crsctl query css votedisk

When can we use -force option?
If our cluster is down, then we can include the -force option to modify the voting disk configuration, without interacting with active Oracle Clusterware daemons. However, using the -force option while any cluster node is active may corrupt our configuration.