Creating VMWare and RAC on Windows Part Two

This is part two of my series on installing RAC on Windows using VMWare and Oracle Unbreakable Linux. I will be presenting a 1/2 day university session on this topic at the RMOUG. I hope you will come.

Why Win/Vmware/Linux/RAC on a laptop? Many DBA's have not had an opportunity to experience RAC for themselves. This configuration is one way for them to do so with minimal cost.

So, I'm on a quest .... a quest to install RAC on VM's sitting on top of Windows. This isn't, shouldn't be, a quest that involves rabbits, holy hand grenades or needing the services of Tim the Enchanter.... But oh, how wrong I was. It seems that Vista was not the right place to be starting and indeed, I did need the services of Tim the Enchanter to even get VMWare 2 started on Vista.

I bought a brand new Dual core Dell Inspiron laptop with 4GB for the task. I can tell you right now that if your installing 11gR2 RAC, you need all of that 4GB. I did 10gR2 RAC on 2 successfully (it was slow and painful)... there is no way your doing that on this install!

I then downloaded the new web based version of VMWare and installed it. No problem there. However, when I click on the icon for VMWare I run into my first problem. It asks me for a username and password. Well, I have no idea what username and password it's expecting. After some research I find that it wants the username/password for the Windows session I'm logged in as. That's intuitive .... So, I enter the credentials. Next it throws a certificate exception at me which I approve and then, I get an error and it won't start the interface to VMWare. I should have taken a screen print of the error but it was like a 404 or something....

Well this is a fine piece of junk!! I start doing some internet research and find that many people have run into the problem. One solution is to use the IP address in the URL that you use to bring up the VMWare console in the browser. I tried that and it worked fine. Still, it wasn't the way it was supposed to work. After reading through some more threads about this problem, I decided to de-install VMWare and re-install it using the administrator account. Of course, you have to enable the administrator account with the net user command first and then you also need to give it a password.

I then re-installed VMWare 2 under the administrator. Everything loaded great this time ... so now, I have my VM Setup and I'm ready to move onto the next step - Installing Oracle Unbreakable Linux. In the next installment, I'll show you a little trick to making the install easier from VM. Rather than having to burn the Linux CD's or the DVD you can simply load directly from the ISO images.

More on that in my next installment.