RAC Attack .....

Last year, I built two VMs on Oracle Virtual box with ASM, etc and built myself a RAC Cluster using what in my opinion is the best resource on the web for building RAC on VMs. As I had been up to neck in work since I started this blog in 2011 and "Blogger"was blocked by that same place of work, oh the evil bloggers. I never kept it up to date, the road to hell and all that. I really wish I had all the notes but no good crying over spilt milk, anyway here is probably the only link you will ever need. You could do the course and get the t-shirt but to be honest, if I can do it (even with my years and years) anybody with half decent Unix / Oracle should be able to.



https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/RAC_Attack_-_Oracle_Cluster_Database_at_Home

It was working like a dream, I could connect to sqlplus and "pull the plug" on one server and would fail over to the second. Great to try out stuff you would never get to do, even in a test environment when not your equipment. The place I was working at would never pay for a "sandpit" so VMs were about as good as it got.

However, my work laptop that I was using at the time (horrible thing) was supplied with a small SSD disk and I was supposed to use cloud storage for all files. Great from a security point of view but pretty useless from a DBA perspective. I would have loved to have built a local E-Business suite environment too but if I was struggling for space for RAC, E-Biz was an impossibility.

As I needed to show one of my colleagues some ZFS on Solaris I had to make the decision to pull the plug on my VMs and build an environment for him to work on. As soon as I had explained ZFS, needed a VM to test Weblogic for a Documentum build - it never ended.

Now, I have my own decent laptop to play with going to build a couple of VMs and do a guide to accompany "RAC Attack". Hopefully. RHEL 7 and Oracle Virtual Additions won't start to complain about anything and I can get a decent stable release. Watch this space!!