ASM Fails to Start When Upgrading from 12.1.0.2 to 19.3.0

Continuing the ASM upgrade bug series from last week: Bug 30265357 is one of the most impactful RAC upgrade bugs you can encounter during a 12.1.0.2 to 19.3.0 Grid Infrastructure upgrade. It’s distinct from Doc ID 2606735.1 and deserves its own analysis.

What happens:

During the upgrade, after the 19c CRS stack starts on node 1, ora.asm (the ASM resource managed by CRS) fails to start. The ASM instance itself may be running as an OS process, but CRS cannot register or control it properly.

Error signatures in CRS logs:

CRS-2674: Start of 'ora.asm' on 'node1' failed
CRS-2632: There are no more servers to try to place resource 'ora.asm' on that is not already attempting to start
ORA-15077: could not locate ASM instance serving a required diskgroup

Root cause:

The 19c version of ocssd.bin (Cluster Synchronization Services) changes how ASM instance discovery works. During the crossgrade window (19c on node 1, 12c on remaining nodes), the CSS heartbeat mechanism and voting disk access patterns change in a way that causes the ASM resource to time out before completing its startup sequence.

Resolution:

Apply the patch bundle that includes the fix for Bug 30265357 to all nodes before beginning the upgrade. The fix is included in 19.7+ RU bungets.
If you’re already mid-upgrade: manually start ASM using srvctl start asm -n node1 and then attempt crsctl start res ora.asm — if successful, proceed with the rootupgrade.sh on remaining nodes.
As a last resort: bounce the entire cluster and restart the upgrade from a clean state.

Always confirm the patch status with opatch lspatches | grep 30265357 before your maintenance window.