An Oracle Standalone Cluster hosts all Oracle Grid Infrastructure services and Oracle ASM locally and requires direct access to shared storage.

The number of cluster nodes in an Oracle Standalone Cluster can be as many as 64 and can host different types of applications. Oracle Standalone Cluster nodes are tightly connected, and have direct access to shared storage. Shared storage is locally mounted on each of the cluster nodes, with an Oracle ASM instance available to all cluster nodes.

Starting with Oracle Grid Infrastructure 19c, configuring GIMR is optional for Oracle Standalone Cluster deployments. The Oracle Standalone Cluster locally hosts the GIMR on an Oracle ASM disk group or a shared file system; this GIMR is a multitenant database with a single pluggable database (PDB).

When you deploy an Oracle Standalone Cluster, you can also choose to configure it as an Oracle Extended cluster. An Oracle Extended Cluster consists of nodes that are located in multiple locations or sites.