Oracle RAC

Oracle 10gR2 RAC Installation & 11gR2 ASM Configuration


In this Document I will cover step by step Oracle RAC installation and configuration on single laptop/desktop using VMWare Server (using two virtual machines, virtual network cards and virtual shared disk for Oracle RAC database shared files system).


One of the biggest obstacles preventing people from setting up test RAC environments is the requirement for shared storage. In a production environment, shared storage is often provided by a SAN or high-end NAS device, but both of these options are very expensive when all you want to do is get some experience installing and using RAC. A cheaper alternative is to use a FireWire disk enclosure to allow two machines to access the same disk(s), but that still costs money and requires two servers. A third option is to use VMware Server to fake the shared storage.

Using VMware Server you can run multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) on a single server, allowing you to run both RAC nodes on a single machine. In addition, it allows you to set up shared virtual disks, overcoming the obstacle of expensive shared storage.

Before you launch the installation, here are a few things to consider.

  • The finished system includes the host operating system, two guest operating systems, two sets of Oracle Clusterware, two ASM instances and two Database instances all on a single server. As you can imagine, this requires a significant amount of disk space, CPU and memory. When I used a dual Intel Core Duo CPU @ 2.80GHz 2.79 GHz , 3.5 GB of RAM it worked fine. I tried this installation on a lesser configuration machine it failed.
  • This procedure provides a bare bones installation to get the RAC working. There is no redundancy in the Clusterware installation or the ASM installation. To add this, simply create double the amount of shared disks and select the "Normal" redundancy option when it is offered. Of course, this will take more disk space.
  • During the virtual disk creation, I always choose not to preallocate the disk space. This makes virtual disk access slower during the installation, but saves on wasted disk space.
  • This should not be considered, a production-ready system. It's simply to allow you to get used to installing and using RAC and configuring ASM.


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