Oracle 12cR1 12.1.0.1 2-node RAC on CentOS 6.4 on VMware Workstation 9 – Part VIII

Time Required: 30 minutes

Class Materials:

  • Oracle 11gR2 Grid Infrastructure software

Next we are going to perform some final steps before we can launch the Oracle Grid Infrastructure install.

The Grid Infrastructure will provide the cluster software that allows the RAC nodes to communicate, as well as the ASM software to manage the shared disks.

To begin, download the zip files from the Oracle software download website and unzip on Ruggero. Make sure you are logged in as the oracle user so that oracle owns the unzipped files.

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Oracle 12cR1 12.1.0.1 2-node RAC on CentOS 6.4 on VMware Workstation 9 – Part VII

Time Required: 60 minutes

Class Materials:

  • 20GB of disk space
  • an ASCII text editor

Next we are going to add shared disk for the RAC cluster to use.

In earlier releases of Oracle RAC, a mimimal RAC could be stood up on less than 5GB of ASM disk. With Oracle 12c that is no longer possible.

For this demonstration I am going to create a 20GB shared disk. If you are tight on space you just about shoe horn it into a 10GB disk.

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Oracle 12cR1 12.1.0.1 2-node RAC on CentOS 6.4 on VMware Workstation 9 – Part VI

Time Required: 60 minutes

Class Materials:

  • none

Next we are going to clone Ruggero to create the second node of our 12c RAC Magda.

Shut down the VM and go to the VMware interface.

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Oracle 12cR1 12.1.0.1 2-node RAC on CentOS 6.4 on VMware Workstation 9 – Part V

Time Required: 20 minutes

Class Materials:

  • none

Next we need to create the Oracle user account, OS groups and mount point.

The Oracle software will be installed and owned by the oracle user account. In addition, several OS groups are created that allow other non oracle OS users privileged access to the database and grid resources.

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Oracle 12cR1 12.1.0.1 2-node RAC on CentOS 6.4 on VMware Workstation 9 – Part IV

Time Required: 60 minutes

Class Materials:

  • none

Next we are going to create two networks for our RAC system to talk on.

The Oracle RAC system requires at least two network connections between cluster nodes. One network will be the public IP and the second will be a private IP reserved for inter-cluster traffic.

VMware Workstation makes this setup very simple.

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Oracle 12cR1 12.1.0.1 2-node RAC on CentOS 6.4 on VMware Workstation 9 – Part III

Time Required: 20 minutes

Class Materials:

  • none

Next we need to configure the Linux kernel to support Oracle 12cR1.

Before we can install Oracle 12cR1 on our new VM, we need configure the Linux kernel. The following steps modify key settings to allow Oracle to execute.

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Oracle 12cR1 12.1.0.1 2-node RAC on CentOS 6.4 on VMware Workstation 9 – Part II

Time Required: 20 minutes

Class Materials:

  • CentOS 6.4 64-bit install media

Before we can install Oracle 12cR1 on our new VM, we need to load additional RPM packages that are required by the Oracle database and grid.

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Oracle 12cR1 12.1.0.1 2-node RAC on CentOS 6.4 on VMware Workstation 9 – Part I

Time Required: 60 minutes

Class Materials:

  • 60GB of free disk
  • An operational VMware Workstation 9 or later install
  • CentOS 6.4 64-bit ISO install media

To create our Oracle 12c RAC database on VMware Workstation 9, we first need to create a Linux VM.

Oracle 12c will eventually be released for a multitude of platforms, but the initial release only support Solaris SPARC, Solaris x86 and Oracle Linux 6.4.

I don’t own a SPARC machine, so instead I am going to install Oracle 12c RAC on CentOS 6.4.

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Oracle 12c RAC runcluvfy.sh error: prerequisites on this operating system distribution

During an install of Oracle 12cR1 RAC Grid Infrastructure on Red Hat or CentOS 6.2, 6.3 or 6.4, you run the runcluvfy.sh script to test node readiness and it fails with the following error:

ERROR: 
Reference data is not available for verifying prerequisites on this operating system distribution
Verification cannot proceed

 
This is due to bug 15973656 which states that runcluvfy.sh cannot properly detect the Red Hat 6.2 and above operating system. The problem also affects CentOS 6.2 and above.

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[INS-41112] Oracle 12c RAC Grid Install error

When installing Oracle 12c RAC, the Grid Installer fails with:

Specified network interface doesn't maintain connectivity across cluster nodes.

 
This error is caused when the Linux firewall is still operational.

Log in as root, shutdown and disable the firewall on all nodes of the cluster:

[root@ora12a ~]# service iptables stop

iptables: Flushing firewall rules:                         [  OK  ]
iptables: Setting chains to policy ACCEPT: filter          [  OK  ]
iptables: Unloading modules:                               [  OK  ]

[root@ora12a ~]# chkconfig iptables off

 
Now retry the Grid installer step and it should succeed.