With the recent news that the latest version of VirtualBox now supports shared disks, I thought I better give it a go and see if I could do a RAC installation on it. The good news is it worked as expected. You can see a quick run through here:
This is pretty good news as that was the last feature that tied me to VMware Server. I’ve now moved pretty much everything I do at home on to VirtualBox and it’s working fine.
It’s worth taking a little time looking at the VBoxManage command line. Some of the operations, like creating the shared disks, have to be done from the command line at the moment. It’s also handy for running VMs in headless mode if you don’t want the GUI screen visible all the time.
Cheers
Tim…
Hey Tim,
That was fast, they just released few day ago, congrats for the guide.
I removed VMware long time ago from my workstation and now this feature of VirtualBox finally fills the gap.
I share the opinion for the headless mode, it’s also perfect for slow terminals or if you can’t start the GUI. At last you can always start RDP server for the target VM and connect to the console through RDP.
Regards,
Sve
p.s. There was a webinar about VirtualBox a month ago. Then Oracle promised to bring back shared disk feature of VirtualBox because they received a lot of complains from customers about lack of shared disk support. They kept the promise.
Hi.
Great to hear from you Sve. I didn’t know you had a blog. I’ll put it in my Google Reader. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Hi,
Well Tim, I followed you advice. Thanks! 😉
Regards,
Sve
Hi Tim,
Excellent post! Now I just need to find a laptop with 8-16Gb of RAM that I can afford to setup 11gR2 RAC with R12 EBS and 11g Fusion Middleware.
Cheers,
Ben
Very good article Tim, but I miss the part where you backup everything in case something goes wrong. Is that easy to do?
Hi.
Sure. Just shutdown the VM and take a snapshot. VirtualBox has snapshots built in.
Cheers
Tim…
Great post Tim. my guest system is window 7. how can we create shared disk on host window 7 and linux oe7 installed each node for oracle 11g rac.
Thanks
Syed
Hi.
You create shared disks the same way.
Cheers
Tim…
Excellent article! Thanks.
Practical 11gR2 how-tos are rare. I built a few 11gR2 RAC simulators myself at http://vgrigorian.com . Thanks. Vladimir Grigorian.
You are a true genius, I often struggled to get this to work this is brilliant and I now have a 2 node 11gr2 rac using virutal box
thanks again
Tim,
How did you manage to get name “eth0” in the network configuration of “rac2”?
Thank you,
J. Muszak
I may add that I run VBox on Windows 7…
Hi.
All network adapters (2 per node) are bridged to a wired ethernet adapter.
Cheers
Tim…