Bleck, there goes my lab-in-a-box idea

We really need to get an embedded mysql option.

And 2nded about companies that make you register a mailinator account to download, what a waste of time. Not naming any names here.

I have been using ESX since 2.5.0 and believe I have been waiting for something that can work in Linux. I personally like the mysql and postgresql. But if we are talking about a massive number of hosts and virtual machines, linux people we all know that postgresql is the way to go.

Conclusion: I think will be great if the come out with options to run the virtual center and vcenster (the new vmware naming) on mysql (for smalll deployments) and (*postgresql* for large deployments) This is based on the facts and performance history of postgresql.

What I am still waiting for is the Virtual Infrastructure or vcenter client that can natively run on Linux

Thank you all for keep pushing on this, that is the only way these big companies will listen, remember we and the places we work at are their primary reason of existence.

God bless us all,

To answer the earlier question of can you run Oracle inside the VC4LIN, yes you can, here's how.

There's a few things to do to get it going, firstly the VM doesn't have enough disk space, I used the vdiskmanager tool (I'm on VMware Server 2.0) to expand the VMDK to 10gig, then used the gparted live CD to expand the root filesystem, it's a GUI so it's easy to use.

Now boot the appliance as normal, before installing the ODBC drivers, and logon as root.

Add some more swap space like this:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=1048576
mkswap /swapfile
swapon /swapfile

You can add the extra swap to /etc/fstab to make it enable automatically on boot.

Next install a couple of packages that Oracle needs:

yum install libaio
yum install bc

Install and configure Oracle

rpm -Uvh oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-1.0.i386.rpm
/etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure

Accept all of the defaults, but set the password to something useful, you'll need this later.

Copy the ODBC files to /root as per the doco, then reboot the virtual machine. When it comes up the ODBC configuration wizard will run, but even if you enter all of the right stuff it will fail as Oracle hasn't started up yet. When it asks you if you want to proceed anyway, say yes.

Once the VM finishes booting, login as root again and run this:

vpxd_odbcconfig

This will rerun the ODBC wizard, but this time it will work as the boot sequence has finished and Oracle is running, it will create the database schema for you.

Reboot the VM one more time and this time everything starts up itself, so you can browse to the VM, download the VI Client and start using it.

Cheers,
Anthony