RAC using VMware workstation 8....

[amansharma81]

Hi sir,

Just want to check with you that is the installation of RAC is possible using VMware Workstation 8? I have just checked VMware's website and as per them, Server is now an obsoleted release and they are encouraging all to shift over to some other release , for example like Workstation. The problem which workstation previously had was that it didn't support clustering thus making it non-suitable for RAC installations. And all the articles over web are using Server only. Just wanted to know what do you recommend. Though Virtualbox is there but I still find its interface a little less appealing compared to VMware(I am going to use it over Windows 7 Professional 64bit edition) so looking for alternatives.

Regards
Aman....

[Tim...]

Hi.

Personally, I use VirtualBox for everything now. I too didn't like the interface at first, but now I like it a lot. It's simpler and uncluttered. It has the added advantages:

- It is owned by Oracle and is part of their desktop virtualization product, so it gets regular updates.
- It is completely free. Not sure why people would pay money when this works great and it's free.
- It works on Mac, Linux and Windows.

I believe the RAC installations will work on Workstation 8, but I've never used it so I can't promise anything. I was using VMware Server as part of the UKOUG RAC Attack. Man, that is a seriously old and knackered product.

Cheers

Tim...

[amansharma81]

Since I am going to follow your advice to stick with Windows and not to go for "pretty box" , I guess I am going to use either VMware or Virtual Box .Yes, I am thinking about the same points that its from Oracle and is free and spending about 200$ is not really a valid point when something free is there. I shall try to get the download done anyways and use it as long as it will offer me trial period and will see how it performs .

Thanks and regards
Aman....

[Tim...]

OK.

[yoder2000]

I started out using VMware Workstation 8.0:

Oracle11gR2

-on-

Oracle Linux 6.1 64-bit

-on-

VMware Workstation 8.0

-on-

Win 7 Enterprise SP1 64-bit

-on-

HP ProBook 6450b 8GB memory

The installation was touch-and-go. I first encountered this problem:

VMware Workstation doesn't support the scsi_id command!

No matter how you flip the parameters, scsi_id always returns error code 1 and <nothing> to stdout. This problem is duly noted in a number of places, most notably here: http://diznix.com/tag/scsi_id/

Once I got around that, I was only able to show two out of the four /dev/asm* disks during the ASM Disk discovery process.

Then, after a number of other attempts, I caught this VMware dialog: "VMware does not support clustering." Whether that is due to a misconfiguration on my part or a limitation on the vendor's part, I don't know.

I have since swapped VMware for VirtualBox, for a number of reasons you cite.

I'm now stuck on the "remote operations" copy, but will keep working at it.

Best,
Bill

[urbex]

The article with minor modifications work fine on VMWare Workstation 8. Only suggestion I would make is if anyone wants to use VMWare use OpenFiler or a similar product, even if its virtual, to create the shared storage. Use iSCSI to connect the shared disks to the Virtual Machines. The rest, partitioning the disks, stamping them for use with ASM etc is all the same.