Deploy a Standard RAC using Oracle VM Templates - Part 1

Hey everyone!, this article would cover only preparing a two-node RAC system using Oracle VM templates. To deploy this, we would, as a prerequisite, required to have an Oracle VM server configured and should have capacity to host two additional VMs with atleast 2GB of RAM and 1 CPU per node.

To begin with, download Oracle VM templates from Oracle website to your VM server under location which is configured in OVM for ftp server. Unzip the files, if there is a multi-part archive then concatenate them first using command:

cat /tmp/OVM_OL7U2_X86_64_12102DBRAC_PVHVM-2of2-partA.tar.gz
/tmp/OVM_OL7U2_X86_64_12102DBRAC_PVHVM-2of2-partB.tar.gz > /tmp/OVM_OL7U2_X86_64_12102DBRAC_PVHVM-2of2.tar.gz

After this is done, opening ftp URL would look like below:

Using this, build URLs like below:

http://ovm.example.com/dl/OVM_OL7U2_X86_64_12102DBRAC_PVHVM-1of2.tar.gz
http://ovm.example.com/dl/OVM_OL7U2_X86_64_12102DBRAC_PVHVM-2of2.tar.gz

To import these files in OVM repository, open console, click on "Repositories" and select "Import VM Template" button

A dialog box will open up, provide URLs in the field:

Clicking OK would submit a job to import/extract these tar.gz files into repository. After the job is completed, you will see a new record under VM Templates section. By editing its properties you can give default options like template name, amount of RAM, CPU count etc.

Now open console for Oracle VM Manager. The URL should be something like:
https://<hostname>.<domain>.com:7002/ovm/console/

Navigate to your server pool and click "Create Virtual Machine"

Choose option - "Clone from an Existing VM Template", click Next

Provide a VM Name and Description.
Choose Clone Count: 2 and Name Index: 1, this would create two VMs named: "DB RAC - Node 1" and "DB RAC - Node 2"

Select correct Repository and VM Template name.

Respective jobs will be submitted to create VMs from template.

Edit Node 1

After the jobs are completed, select Node 1 and click on "Edit" button:

In Edit dialog box, go to "Networks" tab and choose respective network subnets for both vNICs

Now go to the "Disks" tab, select drop-down menu from an empty disk slot, choose option "Virtual Disk" and click on plus sign (create a virtual disk) . This will open a dialog box to edit virtual disk like below. Provide information similar to below screenshot, kindly note that size must be atleast 1GB. Do not forget to check "Shareable" option, as the same disks will be required to add on Node 2.

Choosing "Sparse Allocation" would not immediately allocate all of the physical disk space to virtual disk, whereas if you chose "Non-Sparse Allocation" all of the specified disk space is allocated immediately.

Click OK and repeat the steps to create total of five virtual disks named (ASM1, ASM2 till ASM5).

After this is done, you will see five disks listed as below:

Click on "OK" to close the Edit window.

Edit Node 2

Select Node 2 and click on "Edit" button:

In Edit dialog box, go to "Networks" tab and choose respective network subnets for both vNICs

Now go to "Disks" tab,  select drop-down menu from an empty disk slot, choose option "Virtual Disk" and click on search sign (select a virtual machine disk) . This will open a dialog box to select virtual disk like below. Select ASM disks created earlier, repeat the steps to add all five disks to Node 2.

This prepares two nodes ready for deploying RAC. In next part, I would be taking this further to starting up VMs,doing initial configuration and finally, deploying the RAC.

Quick Link to Part 2