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Building Oracle RAC with Oracle VM!

Nice article this.

Ideally Extended RAC should be implemented using real hardware to achieve better performance, but since this architecture is for research and training purposes only, this compromise is acceptable. Oracle VM Server requires only a single computer, but for installing Oracle VM Manager—a simple Web console for managing virtualized systems—we will need another PC.

As of this writing, Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) is still the preferred storage choice; however, Oracle introduced support for NFS shared storage for datafiles in Oracle Database 11g along with performance enhancements like Oracle Direct NFS. Due to the nature of this installation we will stick with the simpler iSCSI approach as our storage option to keep the real-world FCP concept intact. Note that in an Extended RAC scenario, you must put a third voting disk in a location other than dcA and dcB to achieve a completely fault-tolerant architecture.

Note that the disk mirroring configuration in this guide is inadequate for real-world scenarios; there is also no I/O multipathing or redundant interconnect. And while this guide provides detailed instructions for a successful installation of a complete Oracle RAC 11g evaluation system, it is by no means a substitute for the official Oracle documentation. In addition to this guide, users should also consult the following Oracle documents to fully understand alternative configuration options, installation, and administration with Oracle RAC 11g.

* Oracle Clusterware Installation Guide - 11g Release 1 (11.1) for Linux
* Oracle Clusterware Administration and Deployment Guide - 11g Release 1 (11.1)
* Oracle Real Application Clusters Installation Guide - 11g Release 1 (11.1) for Linux and UNIX
* Oracle Real Application Clusters Administration and Deployment Guide - 11g Release 1 (11.1)
* Oracle Database 2 Day + Real Application Clusters Guide - 11g Release 1 (11.1)
* Oracle Database Storage Administrator's Guide - 11g Release 1 (11.1)

This installation of Oracle VM was performed on:

* Intel QuadCore Q6600 2.4GHz (4 cores)
* 8GB DDR2 RAM
* 3x160GB SATAII 7200 RPM hard disks
* DVD reader

Oracle VM Manager was installed on a workstation (running CentOS 5.0; I could have installed Oracle Enterprise Linux 5, but to save time, I used a CentOS install I already have):

* AMD Sempron 3000+ (single core)
* 1.5GB DDR RAM
* 250GB SATA hard disk
* DVD writer


Check it out!

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