Creating VMWare and RAC on Windows Part Three

This is part three in my journey to installing Oracle 11gR2 RAC on Oracle Unbreakable Linux. In the last installment we got VMWare running after a few mis-steps... Now we are ready to install Oracle Unbreakable Linux. You can easily download and install Oracle unbreakable Linux from Oracle's Linux Download Page. I downloaded the individual CD ISO's (It's a habit), but they also offer a DVD image. One benefit of installing the CD ISO's is that you can download them in parallel, so it can speed up the time to download if you have a big pipe.

Having downloaded the CD ISO's you are ready to install Linux. Notice that I did not burn CD's. What I will do instead is point the VMWare CDRom Drive to the first ISO image, and start the install. What is nice is that as the install requires the next CD image, you can simply go to the VMWare console for that machine and repoint the virtual CDRom drive to the next ISO image. Since you can do this without restarting the machine, it makes installing from the CD ISO images much easier.

The install went well and after a short time I was up and running. Having completed the install, I proceeded to configure the Operating system. At this point, I just had one virtual machine setup, so all I needed to configure was the one machine. Once the configuration (ie: the hosts file, etc) is complete, we will clone the VM and create the second machine.

If you want a real handy guide to configuring Linux and Oracle RAC using VMWare, I highly recommend Tim Hall's Oracle Base site. Tim has done a great job detailing the steps required to create a RAC cluster on VMWare. While his page uses LINUX as the VMWare host, I can attest to the fact that it works with Windows running VMWare too.

Now that we have installed and configured Linux, we are ready to clone the VM. Tim's site does a great job of walking through this process. However there is one small issue to contend with here and I'm thinking this is a windows issue. In VMWare each VM has it's own GUID. The GUID of the VM's are used to assign the MAC addresses to the NIC's in the VM. This means that you have a problem when you bring the second machine up because it's NIC will have the same MAC address of the NIC in the first machine. I think that VMWare is supposed to correct this issue when you cope a VM, but it does not seem to work correctly. So, after cloning the VM, you will need to change the machine's GUID (they call it a UID) in the VMWare configuration file before you start the cloned VM. If you do not do this, you will find your two Linux boxes will not network correctly.

In the next installment we will start laying down Oracle Clusterware. Unfortunately that came with it's own set of problems, and the name of that problem was MS Vista... and it's one nasty problem. Nasty.... nasty.... nasty.