Another blog about 11g... same same, but different.
So, 11g Database is out. Plenty of people have blogged about it, so I thought I'd do something a little different. I know I know, you reaallyy want to hear about my lame attempts at studying.. I'll get there, this is much more fun though...
I thought I'd go through an exercise of the whole 11g on VMWare thing, but instead of doing a half baked job and just installing the database, I'll install the lot:
Yes, it's been done before, like here and here. But this'll be different, I promise.
I used Starwind from RocketDivision, it's pretty cool and they've got a 30day trial. It was easy to set up, I didn't read any doco on it before the attempt and it's working so I must have done something right...
I've got 2GB memory on my laptop so instead of having 3 VM's, 2 for RAC and one for NAS, and have it GO REALLY SLOW, I can now use my host OS (Windows) to serve out the iSCSI targets, and give 900MB each to the vm's (Windows can run on 200MB memory can't it :-)
After the install, it was just a matter of creating a few "Image File" devices, configuring each with "Asynchronous mode" and "allow multiple concurrent iSCSI connections". Two were created at 300MB for the ocr and vote, and two at 4G for the ASM disks.
So, all that done, lets get to the OS.
I spent a while trying to get Enterprise Linux installer to recognise the scsi disk defined in the vmware, but eventually gave up and used ide. I also spent a while trying to get the installer to pick up an iscsi disk as the root partition, but that didn't work either, maybe I'll try that next... If anyone has created a vm using an iscsi disk to cluster the root filesystem , let me know!
Only one vm was created, so I could get all the rpms installed then clone it.
You've probably all seen the pre-install steps for 10g/9i etc, not much has changed, so I'm not going to put down all the kernel parameters I had to change, and the mindnumbing versions of gcc I needed.. If you want that, why are you reading a blog, go to the source...
Don't you think the new document navigation of the 11g documentation is cool. I like it. Remember the 8i Java stuff that you ended up disabling... HA!
Anyway. Went through all the preinstall stuff, created oracle user, crs user, oinstall, dba blah blah...
Installed asmlib just by putting in:
# up2date -i oracleasm-support oracleasmlib oracleasm-`uname -r`
I think it was about here I cloned the vm to a second instance, so I could start getting to the nitty gritty RACy goodness.
Which is where I'll leave you... stay tuned for the next exciting episode, where I battle the mighty CRS, overcome the devious ASM and triumphantly conquer the illustrious ORACLE 11g DATABASE!!! You never know, I might even put in a screenshot.
