Friday 1 August 2008

Oracle on VMWare

One of my current projects is building VMWare virtual machines that I can use to practice installing Oracle 11g and third-party products.  I found some great "cheat sheets" at the Oracle Base website:



  • Oracle DB 11gR1 RAC Installation on OEL5 Using VMWare.  This one covers setting up Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 on VMWare virtual machines in a configuration designed to be used as a RAC node (e.g., dual network interface cards). It's the whole meal, from soup to nuts. The level of detail is great.
  • Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 Installation.  This is a step-by-step, generic setup of OEL5 suitable for adding other software (like Oracle) later. It's not Oracle-specific, but a good overview.


Both of these have lots of screenshots and the little tips that head off disaster.


I do have a couple of qualms, though.


Now that Oracle has released their own virtualization solution, OracleVM, they are not likely to ever support VMWare-based solutions. Part of me says I should be building these VMs on OracleVM. However, Oracle VM requires a separate machine to run, and VMWare doesn't. Plus, VMWare is a clear market leader at this point. Because these machines will be used as learning aids, not production, I don't think it's a big risk.


The other thing is using Oracle Enterprise Linux as the O.S. instead of something more generic. The only reasons I'm going this way are that the cheat sheets use it, and it is a free download.


But clearly, things have come a long way since people were first struggling with Oracle in virtual environments years ago.



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