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Running Oracle VM Server into an Oracle VM Server


Believe it or not, there can be a valid reason to run an Oracle VM Server into an Oracle VM Server and run a Virtual Machine into that. In search of a solution people asked if this was something they could do. They also realized "could do" != "advised to do"


One thing going through my mind immediately was, even if this would work, then this will probably only for education purposes etc. And that was exactly the goal...


Step 1. Logged on to a Dell Precision 3400, with a Quad core cpu and 8GB RAM. This should be enough to do the job. Then booted up Oracle VM Server 2.1.2. After that, started Oracle VM Manager in one of the domains and imported the Oracle VM Server as an iso image as a resource.



Step 2. Created a virtual machine with the following specs:
- Ram 3GB (planning to run only one guest into this guest.)
- Diskspace (enough to hold the Oracle VM Server only since I would run my iso's from the shared NFS storage)
- machine name: OVSServer



Step 3. After creating the VM, the installation of Oracle Virtual Server was as easy as in a normal situation. On my first Oracle VM Server this was now the status:


[root@ovms1 ~]# xm list
Name ID Mem VCPUs State Time(s)
Domain-0 0 667 4 r----- 1207.6
92_OVSServer 9 3000 1 r----- 2800.0
oel-repos 1 1400 2 -b---- 9.1
openfiler1 2 256 1 -b---- 72.2


As you can see the first Oracle VM Server was named: ovms1.


Step 4. Now that I have a Oracle VM Server running into an Oracle VM Server, half of the proof is done. A complete test would of course be to run a VM guest into that.
So, the /OVS was then mounted on the existing NFS share that hold the "running_pool" images, so we were able to use an existing para virtualized image I often use for RAC things.

[root@ovsvirt ~]# xm list
Name                                        ID   Mem VCPUs      State   Time(s)
Domain-0                                     0   542     1     r-----    770.9
vdb11a                                       1  1400     1     ------   2584.5


As shown above, the second Oracle VM Server hostname is called ovsvirt.


Step 5. I noticed, that I could not use Hardware Virtualization Support. So until now I only tried to run para virtualized. Whit that information I was able to start the virtual guest "vdb11a" .

Step 6: See if I could get CRS running on that node:

[root@vdb11a bin]# /crs/bin//crs_stat -t
Name           Type           Target    State     Host        
------------------------------------------------------------
ora....C21.srv application    ONLINE    ONLINE    vdb11a      
ora....C22.srv application    ONLINE    OFFLINE               
ora....NGC2.cs application    ONLINE    ONLINE    vdb11a      
ora....C21.srv application    ONLINE    ONLINE    vdb11a      
ora....C22.srv application    ONLINE    OFFLINE               
ora....INGX.cs application    ONLINE    ONLINE    vdb11a      
ora....21.inst application    ONLINE    ONLINE    vdb11a      
ora....22.inst application    ONLINE    OFFLINE               
ora....B1C2.db application    ONLINE    ONLINE    vdb11a      
ora....SM1.asm application    ONLINE    ONLINE    vdb11a      
ora....1A.lsnr application    ONLINE    ONLINE    vdb11a      
ora.vdb11a.gsd application    ONLINE    ONLINE    vdb11a      
ora.vdb11a.ons application    ONLINE    ONLINE    vdb11a      
ora.vdb11a.vip application    ONLINE    ONLINE    vdb11a      
ora....SM2.asm application    ONLINE    OFFLINE               
ora....1B.lsnr application    ONLINE    OFFLINE               
ora.vdb11b.gsd application    ONLINE    OFFLINE               
ora.vdb11b.ons application    ONLINE    OFFLINE               
ora.vdb11b.vip application    ONLINE    ONLINE    vdb11a 


Summary. Test succeeded.

We are able to run an oracle VM Server as a guest into an Oracle VM Server. And even into that Oracle VM Server, you could run Oracle RAC as a virtual guest (unsupported) without effort.


Rene Kundersma
Oracle Expert Services, The Netherlands

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I am unable to understand this post. But well some points are useful for me.

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on January 10, 2009 9:57 AM.

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