11gR2 RAC on VMWare Part One

“Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it." - Anthony Robbins

So, with that quote in mind, I set out on my new venture, installing Oracle 11gR2 RAC on VMWare on MS Vista. Did I mention on 4gb?! I do this hopeful that I can use this configuration for my RMOUG class on creating a RAC cluster on Windows using VMWare.

Already I hear the collective gasp from the crowd. You are right, I must be mad.

I've installed RAC many a time, and in fact, I've successfully installed it on Win XP with 2GB using VMWare and 10GR2. It was slow, it was unusable but it would come up and I could access the SCOTT schema and query the EMP table. Thus, I called it a success and moved on.

Now the target is a much loftier one... This would be my first foray into the new 11gR2 RAC, believe it or not. Since R2 has come out, I've played with the database quite a bit, but not with a clustered version. It just has not been something I needed to do, and I'm also a bit of a manager type now.... so getting my hands dirty is only an occasional thing I'm afraid.

So, let me first describe to you my environment. I'm running on a dual core Pentium, running Vista and 4GB. Now, already I know I'm in trouble because from all accounts 4GB is like the bare bones minimum. But I am a manly DBA, and I face resource constraints and spit in the face of them. I can and will get this working.

In my next blog post, I'll share with you my first few frustrations and failures. As a hint, the new version of VMWare and Vista don't play nice.