Oracle 11g R2 Grid Infrastructure installation on 2 node cluster using Virtualbox

Hi Guyzz,

Though there is a lot of buzz on Oracle engineered systems, RAC deployments, 12c technical enablements but still certain basics and walkthrough demos appear to be quite handy and helpful for upcoming professionals in the area. In last few times, I was trying to refresh the demonstration of two node RAC database installation on a virtualbox. Here is an abstract followed by a detailed demo document.

I hope the post justifies the purpose and the efforts.

Introduction

Since its inception in Oracle 9i, the Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) technology has been an active topic of discussion in the community. Oracle 11gR2 RAC offers high availability, scalability (scaling out capability), manageability, reduced ownership cost, and cloud architecture platform. The RAC technology allows the establishment of multiple instances to a single database server which hosts an enterprise application.

Oracle 11g R2 RAC system necessarily works on grid architecture. The master RAC node must have grid infrastructure installed with the remaining nodes replicated accordingly. The Oracle 11gR2 grid infrastructure installation integrates oracle clusterware and oracle ASM. Oracle Clusterware is responsible for High Availability framework, process monitoring, event management and group membership. On the other hand, oracle ASM suffices the need of a conventional file system while offering multiple add-on features like online disk manipulation, auto I/O load balancing, stripping and mirroring of data and finally ease the data storage management.

The RAC customers/users often report their difficulties and issues in the installation phase. Before planning the grid infrastructure installation, it has to be prepared appropriately so that it suffices all the requirements of a clusterware and memory management. There are multiple areas to be looked upon before the grid installation like network, system kernel parameters, NTPD settings, node connectivity, and ASM disk setup. The document describes the prerequisites of a system to be planned for gird installation. Please note that the document is not a guide for RAC installation but a reference to provide hands-on with RAC installation on oracle virtualbox.

Approach

The document illustrates the installation of Oracle 11gR2 grid infrastructure and 2 node RAC database on virtualbox. The two virtualbox machine images installed with OEL, would serve as the cluster nodes. Initially, we will create only one virtual machine image and do all sorts of configurations required for the grid installation. The master node would be then cloned to create the second node participating in the cluster.

Memory requirements

The host system running the two virtual machine images must have sufficient memory to run both images simultaneously. RAM above 4GB would be best suited for the demo.

Software Requirement

Following software can be procured from Oracle Technology Network in order to follow this demonstration

a) Oracle Virtualbox 4.2

b) Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.6

c) Oracle 11gR2 Grid Infrastructure (64 bit)

d) Oracle 11gR2 Database (64 bit)

Here is the complete demo document for download

Oracle Grid and Database software installation on Virtualbox

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