ASM Rebalance Too Slow? 3 Tips To Improve Rebalance Times

I’ve run into a few customers recently who have had problems with their ASM rebalance operations running too slowly. Surprisingly, there were some simple concepts being overlooked – and once these were understood, the rebalance times were dramatically improved. For that reason, I’m documenting the solutions here… I hope that somebody, somewhere benefits…

1. Don’t Overbalance

Every time you run an ALTER DISKGROUP <NAME> REBALANCE operation you initiate a large amount of I/O workload as Oracle ASM works to evenly stripe data across all available ASM disks (i.e. LUNs). The most common cause of rebalance operations running slowly that I see (and I’m constantly surprised how much I see this) is to overbalance, i.e. cause ASM to perform more I/O than is necessary.

It almost always goes like this. The customer wants to migrate some data from one set of ASM disks to another, so they first add the…