Oracle 11gR2 RAC on VM on ESXi4

[maranchi83]

Hi All,

I am trying to setup 11gR2 RAC on 2 VMs which are spread across 2 ESXi Hosts. i am using FC SAN LUNs for configuration of cluster and ASM. So far i have tested and tried everything as asked by VMware but i am still unable to configure RAC properly. Everytime on second node it gives me error that UNABLE to READ SUPER BLOCK 22.

My Configuratios:-

OS- RHEL5 Update 1

Shared DISK:- 10 GB FC SAN LUN using

SCSI BUS SHARING= PHYSICAL

SCSI CONTROLLER = LSI LOGIC SAS, However here if i try changing the controller to LSI LOGIC PARALLEL, The VM doesn't start, simply displays a Blank Screen.

With LSI LOGIC SAS i have already setup the same RAC successfully but both the VMs were on the same ESXi4 Host.

Please, help me on this. If this is a Controller problem then please point to the right controller. If i need to download any controller please let me know the details.

Thanks.

[jintoa]

Can you mention which document you are following to set up RAC?

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[maranchi83]

For RAC setup once i had used Oracle Documentation but now since i remember all the steps i don't use them. However here the main problem is if anybody has tried this , i mean spreading the VMs across two Physical Hosts and then setting up a RAC. This is the same problem that i had faced when i was trying to setup RAC on VMware Workstation 6.5, but then i come to know that Workstation doesn't support clustering. Apart from that On VMWare site a clustering doc is available but this dos describes MS CLustering not Oracle CLustering, though i did exactly what is said in the doc but still it's not working.

[Prabgun]

Try link:

http://gurpartapblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/install-oracle-rac-11gr2-on-vmware-on.html

[maranchi83]

Thanks for the link though this link is useless for me. I am trying to setup RAC on 2 VMs across 2 ESXi Hosts.Whatever is mentioned in the link, i have already done using one VMWare server and one ESXi host. It seems that free version of ESXi doesn't support setting up RAC across two Physical ESXi Hosts.

[MollyF]

I have two Linux VMs on esxi 4.0. I have vmfs filesystem. I want to create an oracle 11g rac cluster across the two vms using raw devices for my ocr and voting files and asm for my data. anyone seen any decent instructions to get this working? Lots of hits on google on using raw devices but nothing on sharing the in esxi:-( thank you.

[cdu]

I've done it with ESX 4.1, but it should be same.

How many SCSI controllers do you have? The OS should use one, and another one for shared disks, the bus ID should be same cross VM for shared disk.

ie. OS disk uses LSI PARALLEL, bus ID: 0:0

shared disk uses LSI SAS, bus ID: 1:0

This has to be identical on both VMs, bus sharing physical.

[MattWhelan]

Hi all,

Has anybody managed to get this working correctly using two ESXi 4.1 hosts and a RAC node on each?

I have managed to get Oracle RAC working on one ESXi host but when I try to move this over two hosts I never manage to get the installation to run successfully. It always fails whilst running root.sh on the second node with the error "TIMED OUT WAITING FOR THE CRS STACK TO START".

I have tried every which way, multiple SCSI controllers set to physical, multiple NIC's on separate networks etc. but all to no avail.

Some posts on other forums suggest network misconfiguration, but again I have tried any number of ways without success.

If anybody could help it would be hugely appreciated. Is it possible to actually get working over two hosts?

Many thanks

Matt

[MattWhelan]

An update for this topic.

I finally found a solution for this and have managed to get it working.

The problem was to do with Solaris and the way that it handles shared disks, for whatever reason it would not share the disks between two servers simultaneously. I could have one VMWare ESXi server with two Oracle RAC nodes running but if I tried with two nodes on different ESXi servers the second node would time out during install.

I tried everything I could think of but no success.

Finally I tried a different operating system and went for Oracle Linux (free to download and use, plus now supported on VMWare), this allows the use of ASMLIB packages which is a storage management type package that handles the sharing of disks over many servers etc...

This provided the solution and now I have a four node Oracle RAC 11g2 setup spread over two ESXi servers, two nodes on each.

The web pages http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/10g/ASMUsingASMLibAndRawDevices.php have a lot of useful hints and step by step how-to's that were invaluable in working this out.