Re: RAC configuration without shared storage

"Patrick London" <mpmers_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:b43da98f.0208211706.166b5a75_at_posting.google.com...
> with the VMWare solution did you have 2 virtual machines simulating 2
nodes
> and have a 3rd virtual that stored the datafiles etc? assuming
> that is the case, what mechanism did you use to have both nodes be able
> to access the same datafiles - i.e. did you store the Oracle components
> (datafiles, etc.)
> on raw devices on the 3rd virtual and then have the 2 nodes have the
> same share (say windows) or remote nfs mount (say linux/unix) to the
> location? we are confused how to accomplish the 'sharing' of
> data devices without file/OS locking or permission problems.

I'm afraid I can't say too much at this stage, because I'm in the middle of writing this up, and I want to make sure I don't make mistakes. I also haven't debugged the process completely so that it is plain sailing.

But you resolve file/OS locking issues by not having an O/S filesystem on the shared drive. Which means you create an extended partition, and then create multiple logical volumes, unformatted, on that partition (you need a minimum of 4 logical volumes). The 9i OUI then does all the rest (checkout the clustersetup.exe on the preinstall_rac directory of disk 1 of the install set).

The point being that VMWare *does* allow the sharing of an added SCSI device, but (a) it requires an undocumented tweak to the vmx file and (b) the initial drive must be IDE, otherwise the added drive doesn't seem to want to get shared.

You also can't do it with the sort of SCSI disks that VMWare 3 creates, since they are of variable geometry. You need a fixed geometry disk, otherwise known as "plain SCSI", which VMWare 2 was able to create (and VMWare 3 can read/write).

Oracle now supplies (with 9i release 2) a cluster file system for Windows, which makes working with the shared device a doddle... before that, I was using raw partitions (ie, Logical drives on an extended partition), and that was proving troublesome to manage, since addressing raw partitions isn't something I've done a lot of.

Regards
HJR
>
> "Howard J. Rogers" <howardjr2000_at_yahoo.com.au> wrote in message
news:<3d620880_at_dnews.tpgi.com.au>...
> > It's also possible to evaluate a multi-node RAC on a single PC.
> >
> > Say hello to VMWare.
> >
> > Each VMWare machine is a virtual, and 'independent' PC. So you can
practice
> > with cluster guard, for example, and see node failover happen, which the
> > usual 'multiple instances running one database on a single PC' can't do.
> >
> > Regards
> > HJR
> >
> >
> > "Patrick London" <mpmers_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message
> > news:b43da98f.0208191443.74e3937c_at_posting.google.com...
> > > I have seen various posts about configuring and running RAC under
> > > various operating systems, such as Windows 2000 or Linux, without
> > > having a shared storage array (and the corresponding controllers,
> > > hardware, firm ware, etc.). It appears that you can test RAC on
> > > single machine (in a simple test environment), but it also appears
> > > that you can still evaluate RAC in a multi-node environment by
> > > using a something like NFS and having each node mount the same remote
> > > file system.
> > >
> > > Is running a multi-node RAC environment using NFS possible?
> > >
> > > Are there other similar solutions for multi-node RAC environments (for
> > > testing purposes) like NFS?
> > >
> > > I see that the OakTable group had a demo at Oracle Open World where
> > > they had people walk up with their laptops to join the RAC cluster -
> > > how and where were they managing the data files, etc.? I could not
> > > find information on their configuration for that demo.
> > >
> > > Any information would be much appreciated.
> > >
> > > Patrick
Received on Thu Aug 22 2002 - 06:56:54 CDT