Tag: virtualbox

Oracle Database 12c Virtual RAC Installation on Oracle Linux 6

I finally got my server problems sorted out yesterday, so I was able to do a 12c virtual RAC installation. You can see what I did here:

The setup is pretty much the same as the 11gR2 setup. So there’s no real drama at all.

With the basic installation articles out of the way I can start having a play with the functionality.

I’ve now got 12c running under VirtualBox on my server (Oracle Linux), desktop (Fedora 18), laptop (OS X) and desktop at work (Windows 7). If I can just get it running on my Nexus 4 and Nexus 7… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

 

VirtualBox 4.2.14 Released…

Oracle VirtualBox 4.2.14 has been released. The downloads and changelog are in the usual places.

Happy upgrading!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. You can start your downloads, now mine is complete. 🙂

PPS. I got the Mac download, but it looks like the others haven’t made it on to the mirrors yet. 🙂

PPPS. The other downloads are available now too. 🙂

Why is my VirtualBox VM not starting properly?

I’ve just wasted quite a bit of time trying to figure out why one of my VirtualBox VMs wasn’t starting properly, so I thought I would share the experience here in case anyone else has a similar issue…

It all started because I decided to fire up an OL6 VM, that I hadn’t used for a little while. It started up fine and I figured I should probably patch the OS and the VirtualBox Guest Additions. The first thing I did was a “yum update” to bring it up to OL6.4 and the the latest UEK2. Once that was complete I did a reboot and that is where the issue started. The VM booted in the normal fashion, but then hung at this point.

ol6-startup

I was able to SSH to the VM, so I knew it wasn’t a complete disaster, but something was definitely wrong.

I tried an interactive startup, just to see if the main part of the startup was actually OK, as the white bar suggests. Sure enough, everything started as expected, then just hung after the last prompt.

Next, I started up in single user mode. That went fine, so I switched to full user mode using “init 3”. That was also went OK. Rather than doing “init 5” I just typed “startx”, which produced a big pile of garbage. So X was mangled, but I wasn’t getting kicked back to the prompt.

Before embarking on a mission to fix X I decided to upgrade the VirtualBox Guest Additions. That removed the old 4.2.6 version and installed the 4.2.10 version. Once complete I rebooted and everything worked fine. 🙂

Normally I try to keep my Linux kernels and VirtualBox Guest Additions up to date, but even when I’ve let VMs like this fall by the wayside I’ve not encountered this before.

Anyway, I can chalk that up to experience. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…