VMware Cloud Community
ewhite7
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Snapshots, vApps, and Shared storage...

Our DBA needs to experiment with different Oracle RAC configurations and upgrade paths.

I have a spare ESX server that I was going to dedicate to him.

An Oracle RAC test instance will consist of 2 VMs, one for each RAC node, and some kind of shared storage.

I was going to use independent disks to simulate a connection to a shared SAN LUN for the two RAC nodes.

However, I really want to be able to snapshot configurations, so he can reset the environment to try different approaches.

Does anyone know of an alternative that might work for this that I can snapshot? 

If I place the 2 VMs in a vApp, can I snapshot them together.

Alternatively, if I cannot get this approach to work, is it possible to have a vApp with 2 VMs and a few independent disks that I can convert to a template?

This ESX host is running vSphere 5.5 standard.

Reply
0 Kudos
1 Reply
ewhite7
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

This turned out to be a great resource:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/solutions/oracle/Oracle_Databases_VMware_RAC_Deployment_Guide.pdf

as did this:

VMware KB: Enabling or disabling simultaneous write protection provided by VMFS using the multi-writ...

Unfortunately, I cannot find a way to snapshot a shared disk.  I knew this used to be impossible, but had hoped that this had changed.

Reply
0 Kudos