ESXi and Shared storage Oracle RAC

[Arokh]

I've been trying to setup a Oracle RAC scenario using two VM Servers on a single host machine. I've installed the OS for both VM's and prepared them both to receive the Oracle Clusterware. My problem comes when I start adding the disks to the first machine and attempting to make them virtual so that the second server will be able to see the raw partition for the OCR and Voting disk. The Host machine has 2 processors, 16GB of RAM, 500G of internal storage with no SAN attached.

Steps I've done to try and resolve this issue.

1. Used the RCLI utility to zero out the hard drive file.

2. Used the RCLI to create the drive and zero it out as well.

The error I get when I try to change the second SCSI controller (The first controller has the OS partition assigned 0:1) to Virtual is "Invalid configuration on device 1"

What am I missing here? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[mikepodoherty]

These articles should help:

2 Articles on how to set up RAC for test purposes using VMware and Linux. One is 10g and the other is 11g.

Hope you find these articles useful.

[Arokh]

I appreciate the articles, the second is the one I was using as a guide for this implementation and doesn't speak about creating the storage unfortunately.

[Arokh]

I discovered the issue causing my problem. I had taken a snapshot of the operating system drive after I had finished installing as a safety measure. It appears that you cannot have Virtual hard disks while snapshots are on the server. Once I removed the snapshot the configuration change was allowed.

[st0ma]

Hello Arokh,

The shared storage situation was quite obscure when I was going through the Oracle 10g RAC installation on ESXi3 but what you are saying is correct. If snapshots are present there is no way the SCSI controller could be attached as virtual or physical which is neccessary for the purpose of the Oracle Shared Storage.

I have created few articles for the installation of Oracle RAC on ESXi3 using SLES9 SP5.

Everything starts from Part 1 here http://unix.soteks.org

I will be more than glad if these articles re useful to someone that is about to create such environment.

Kind regards,

St0ma

[Simon_H]

St0ma/Arokh

When you set up your OCR, voting and ASM disks you put them on an independent SCSI bus as you say, but you should mark them in VIC as Independent (Independent disks are not affected by snapshots) and Persistent (Changes are immediately and permanently written to disk), e.g. in the .vmx config file as:

scsi1:1.present = "true"

scsi1:1.fileName = "/vmfs/volumes/.../shared-01d/voting_disk.vmdk"

scsi1:1.mode = "independent-persistent"

scsi1:1.deviceType = "scsi-hardDisk"

I couldn't see this mentioned in and may explain why you were having trouble with snapshots.

-Simon

[st0ma]

Hello Simon,

Spot on!

I have not tried this for various reasons but it looks like a reasonable solution considering the architecture.

I will make tests as soon as possible and I will update the article if it is for the better!

Thanks again for the remark.

KR,

St0ma

[yorkie]

Full guide to Oracle 10G RAC and Oracle 11G RAC on VIOPS

[petedr]

Thanks for posting the full guides.

www.phdvirtual.com, makers of esXpress