RAC-in-a-box - Part 1: Building a Linux-based RAC 11gr2 cluster on VMWare

My DBA colleagues have long told me the tale of 'RAC on a rope' - the battered demonstration kit that Oracle have used to show off RAC to customers.

I've long been intrigued by RAC, and puzzled by its apparent instability on our work systems and so decided to take advantage of the OTN accounts ability to download and use Oracle software for trial purposes.  This coincided with a time where VMWare ESXi 4 was released on a free to use basis, and servers without explicit virtualisation features were being dumped on eBay.

All the ingredients for my very own RAC on a rope based on either Linux or Solaris... ideal for proving my suspicion that our preferred vendors OS and hardware were the cause of the problems and not RAC.

First off, the hardware. The Fujitsu Primergy RX220 is a 1U high rackmount server, based around a dual socket 940 system board. With a pair of dual core Opteron 280's and 16Gb RAM installed it packs a lot into its chassis. What does present a problem are the 2 SATA bays, which mean theres not a lot of storage and no scope for splitting storage into data and system.

I originally completed this build in mid2010, so in many ways this is a retrospective look at what I did. Unfortunately my workplace has taken much of my time since then and so details are not as fresh in my mind as they should be.

The first step was to install VMWare ESXi onto a USB key, this is the 'boot disk', and while its pretty slow, it leaves the main SATA disks free for the Virtual Machines we need to define.

The four VM's are:-

• ldns1
• liscsi1
• lrac1
• lrac2  

These were named with expandability in mind, highly available DNS, Multipathed iSCSI, and nodes 3 and 4 within the cluster, however from earlier attempt with Solaris+10g I expected resources to be tight and to this date haven't explored those options.

I started out building a Linux cluster based around Centos 5.5, which if you aren't aware is a freely available RedHat clone. I had originally planned on using Oracles own OEL, however I got bored waiting on the Export Validation to clear. This impatience cost me a little later on, but nothing googling can't work around.

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RAC-in-a-box - Part 1: Building a Linux-based RAC 11gr2 cluster on VMWare

RAC-in-a-box - Part 2: Building the DNS Server

RAC-in-a-box - Part 3: Building the iSCSI Server

RAC-in-a-box - Part 4: Building the RAC nodes