Oracle 10g RAC On Windows 2003 Using VMware Server

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[Courtesy: http://www.oracle-base.com]

This article describes the installation of Oracle 10g release 2 (10.2.0.1) RAC on Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition using VMware Server with no additional shared disk devices.

Introduction

One of the biggest obstacles preventing people from setting up test RAC environments is the requirement for shared storage. In a production environment, shared storage is often provided by a SAN or high-end NAS device, but both of these options are very expensive when all you want to do is get some experience installing and using RAC. A cheaper alternative is to use a FireWire disk enclosure to allow two machines to access the same disk(s), but that still costs money and requires two servers. A third option is to use VMware Server to fake the shared storage.
Using VMware Server you can run multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) on a single server, allowing you to run both RAC nodes on a single machine. In additon, it allows you to set up shared virtual disks, overcoming the obstacle of expensive shared storage.
Before you launch into this installation, here are a few things to consider.

• The finished system includes the host operating system, two guest operating systems, two sets of Oracle Clusterware, two ASM instances and two Database instances all on a single server. As you can imagine, this requires a significant amount of disk space, CPU and memory. To complete this installation I used a dual 3.0G Xeon server with 4G of memory.
  
• This procedure provides a bare bones installation to get the RAC working. There is no redundancy in the Clusterware installation or the ASM installation. To add this, simply create double the amount of shared disks and select the "Normal" redundancy option when it is offered. Of course, this will take more disk space.
  
• During the virtual disk creation, I always choose not to preallocate the disk space. This makes virtual disk access slower during the installation, but saves on wasted disk space.
  
• This is not, and should not be considered, a production-ready system. It's simply to allow you to get used to installing and using RAC.

For Installation tutorial click here