Building an Inexpensive Oracle RAC 11g Release 1 on Linux – (CentOS 5.1 / iSCSI)

Contents

1. Overview
2. Oracle RAC 11g Overview
3. Shared-Storage Overview
4. iSCSI Technology
5. Hardware and Costs
6. Install the Linux Operating System
7. Install Required Linux Packages for Oracle RAC
8. Network Configuration
9. Install Openfiler
10. Configure iSCSI Volumes using Openfiler
11. Configure iSCSI Volumes on Oracle RAC Nodes
12. Create “oracle” User and Directories
13. Configure the Linux Servers for Oracle
14. Configure RAC Nodes for Remote Access using SSH
15. All Startup Commands for Both Oracle RAC Nodes
16. Install and Configure Oracle Cluster File System (OCFS2)
17. Install and Configure Automatic Storage Management (ASMLib 2.0)
18. Download Oracle RAC 11g Software
19. Pre-Installation Tasks for Oracle Clusterware 11g
20. Install Oracle Clusterware 11g
21. Install Oracle Database 11g
22. Install Oracle Database 11g Examples (formerly Companion)
23. Create TNS Listener Process
24. Create the Oracle Cluster Database
25. Post-Installation Tasks – (Optional)
26. Verify TNS Networking Files
27. Create / Alter Tablespaces
28. Verify the RAC Cluster and Database Configuration
29. Starting / Stopping the Cluster
30. Troubleshooting
31. Conclusion
32. Acknowledgements
33. About the Author

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Overview

One of the most efficient ways to become familiar with Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) 11g technology is to have access to an actual Oracle RAC 11g cluster. In learning this new technology, you will soon start to realize the benefits Oracle RAC 11g has to offer like fault tolerance, new levels of security, load balancing, and the ease of upgrading capacity. The problem though is the price of the hardware required for a typical production RAC configuration. A small two node cluster, for example, could run anywhere from US$10,000 to well over US$20,000. This would not even include the heart of a production RAC environment, the shared storage. In most cases, this would be a Storage Area Network (SAN), which generally start at US$10,000.

For those who simply want to become familiar with Oracle RAC 11g, this article provides a low cost alternative to configure an Oracle RAC 11g system using commercial off the shelf components and downloadable software for educational purposes. The estimated cost for this configuration could be anywhere from US$2,000 to US$2,500. The system will consist of a dual node cluster (each with a single processor), both running Linux (CentOS 5.1), Oracle 11g Release 1, OCFS2, and ASMLib 2.0. All shared disk storage for Oracle RAC will be based on iSCSI using a Network Storage Server; namely Openfiler Release 2.2 (respin 2).

Powered by rPath Linux, Openfiler is a free browser-based network storage management utility that delivers file-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) and block-based Storage Area Networking (SAN) in a single framework. Openfiler supports CIFS, NFS, HTTP/DAV, FTP, however, we will only be making use of its iSCSI capabilities to implement an inexpensive SAN for the shared storage components required by Oracle RAC 11g. A 500GB internal hard drive will be connected to the network storage server (sometimes referred to in this article as the Openfiler server) through a SATA PCI Card. The Openfiler server will be configured to use this disk for iSCSI based storage and will be used in our Oracle RAC 11g configuration to store the shared files required by Oracle Clusterware as well as all Oracle ASM volumes.

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