Oracle RAC on VirtualBox…

 

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…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

13 thoughts on “Oracle RAC on VirtualBox…”

  1. 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.

  2. 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

  3. Very good article Tim, but I miss the part where you backup everything in case something goes wrong. Is that easy to do?

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. Tim,
    How did you manage to get name “eth0” in the network configuration of “rac2”?
    Thank you,
    J. Muszak

Comments are closed.