You can install Storage Foundation for Oracle Real Application Clusters (SF Oracle RAC) on virtual machines in VMware ESX environments. Each virtual machine within an ESX host is like a physical system with its own virtual operating components. Each VMware ESX host can contain multiple virtual machines. However, virtual machines that belong to the same SF Oracle RAC cluster must reside on different ESX hosts.
The virtual machines in the SF Oracle RAC clusters are connected by two virtual private links that are mapped onto the physicals links that connect the physical ESX hosts. You can configure each VMware ESX host to use local or shared storage. The configuration files of virtual machines can be located on shared or local storage. The database data files must be located on shared storage. All shared disks must support SCSI-3 Persistent Group Reservation (PGR). Therefore, the shared disks must be configured to use physical raw disk mapping (rdmp) compatibility mode. Since disks run in rdmp mode, you cannot migrate virtual machines using the vMotion feature. SF Oracle RAC supports paravirtual drivers for SCSI controllers.
To deploy SF Oracle RAC in VMware environments, you must:
- Set up VMware ESX hosts and add the hosts to the VMware Datacenter.
- Create a VMware cluster in the Datacenter and add the VMware ESX hosts to the VMware cluster.
- Create virtual machines, which will be part of the SF Oracle RAC cluster, inside each ESX host.
- Install the operating system on each virtual machine.
- Create and share disks in rdmp mode between the virtual machines in the SF Oracle RAC cluster. Make sure that the datastore for shared disks is accessible to all virtual machines.
- Install and configure SF Oracle RAC inside each virtual machine.
- Install Oracle RAC inside each virtual machine.
For information on deploying SF Oracle RAC in VMware environments, see:
Application note: Setting up Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC in VMware ESX environments
See the following topics for installing and configuring SF Oracle RAC:
SF Oracle RAC documentation for other platforms and releases can be found on the SORT website.
