Although some crosstalk is inevitable, I should point out that a more appropriate forum for this question would be the Everything Oracle at EMC community, of which Sam Lucido and I are co-administrators. Having said that, when we become aware of a question on another forum such as this one, we are happy to respond.  I would say that the answer by Alan Robertson, above, is very helpful. As Alan points out, in an ASM context there are a couple of high-level architectural decisions:   You have another option as well: NFS using Direct NFS. You indicated that you want to use ASM, so I will not cover that further here.  All of these options, as well as some detailed best practices and recommendations regarding storage layout can be found in the Virtualizing Oracle 11g RAC on vSphere technical session that Sam and I co-presented at VMworld 2011. Feel free to take a look at this presentation, and please let Sam or me know if you have any questions on the content.
Hello folks,  we are looking at starting virtualizing our Oracle 11g systems. Some systems are RAC and some are standalone.  Currently we use ASM with ASMLib to manage disk.  I am trying to get some feedback on what other folks are doing in terms of their disk strategy. Here are my questions :  1) do you dedicate datastores for data files and separate datastore for log files ? 2) do you use paravirtualized disk ? 3) do you simply present a big vmdk file and then fdisk it and "oracleasm createdisk"  or do you use LVM and then "oracleasm createdisk" 4) what other questions should i be asking ?  I've found some random papers online but nothing specific.  Thank you
Oracle 11g with ASM - disk layout strategy