Re: 9i RAC External shared hard disks

"Jack" <nospam_at_nospam.com> wrote in message news:SwGwa.11441$6q6.2668853_at_news2.telusplanet.net...
> Thanks Howard and Connor. I have got 2 Windows 2000 server running on
local
> network. Please refer to the following HW config.
>
> machine A
> P3 866G
> 2 * HD with 20G each
> 512M RAM
>
> machine B
> P4 1.8G
> 2 * HD with 80G each
> 1G RAM
>
> After read articles on www.oaktable.net, given 2 PC, RAC can not be
> installed without external shared disk. Then vmware comes into play where
> you can create 2 virtual OSes with virtual shared disks as well, and
having
> 2 PC does not bring me any advantage on that. Is my understanding right?

Correct. If you're going to do 'real' RAC, then you need a bit more hardware (including an external hard drive). But if all you want to do is simulate a RAC, then only a single PC is needed in any case (and I'd be doing it on machine B, because of all that extra RAM).

As Connor points out, you can do RAC on machine B alone simply by dedicating the second of your 80GB hard disks to being the shared drive. But it can't have any other partitions on it, otherwise the Cluster Services installer won't be persuaded it's a viable shared disk.

Personally, for testing, I would have thought 80GB was a bit of overkill, and that's why the VMware approach is useful, because you can create the shared disk of whatever size you want.

Alternatively, if VMware is not your thing, I'd swap one of your 20GB drives currently in machine A with your second 80GB drive in machine B. Then you can dedicate 20GB of real drive space to the shared disk, which isn't nearly so 'over the top'.

(You still haven't specified an operating system, though, so things might be different with Linux... put it this way, I just installed Oracle 9.2 on a 12GB virtual machine with not a shared disk in sight, and the Universal Installer was perfectly happy to present me with a 'Cluster' option. That doesn't happen with Windows).

Regards
HJR Received on Thu May 15 2003 - 07:20:33 CDT