RAC on Air with #racattack
“8 GB RAM should be enough”,”most of laptops produced after 2011 should be ok”, that’s what www.racattack.org states about the requirements for creating a small and simple virtual RAC cluster. So let’s start with a small MacBook Air 11,6″..
The host:
The documentation of RACAttack says that you need about 40 GB of disk space, but it’s slightly more:
- 55 GB for the two virtual machines and the shared storage
- about 15 GB for the installation media (OS, virtualization software, database + grid infrastructure software (zipped + unzipped)
- so it’s about 70 GB altogether and I had to use an external drive
The shared storage:
Buffalo HD-PA1.0TU3-EU MiniStation Thunderbolt (2,5 Zoll) external HD 1TB (16MB Cache, 5400rpm, USB 3.0)
Installation
The installation is really well documented and straightforward. The only issue I had was the following message when booting the first virtual machine for the first time:
.. I pressed “OK” to ignore it and everything was OK.
It took me about 4 and a half hours to go through the whole installation procedure (OS, grid infrastructure, database software, database creation), and finally:
Here it is: Linux-based 2-node RAC (with 3 GB RAM each) and a 2-instance CDB.
So, well done #racattack team and thanks for the good manual!
Links & Download locations:
- http://www.racattack.org – the instructions
- http://www.virtualbox.org – the virtualization software
- http://iterm2.com – iTerm2 for Mac (not required, but I like it more than the builtin terminal application)
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/chicken/ – Chicken (free VNC client for Mac)
- http://otn.oracle.com – database and grid infrastructure software (please download version 12.1.0.1)
- https://edelivery.oracle.com/linux – Oracle Linux (please download version 6.4, the ACFS stuff does not work with newer versions)