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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Installing Oracle 11.2.0.3 on CentOS 6.3 on VMware Workstation 8.

In this blog post, we are going to install Oracle 11.2.0.3 64-bit on CentOS 6.3 using VMware Workstation 8. Given that Oracle no longer offers ASMLib for non Oracle branded Linux, we are going to use UDEV rules to manage the disk presentation to ASM.

In my 10-part post on installing Oracle RAC on VMware Workstation I deliberately used an excessive number of screen shots to guide readers through the process. This time I am going to assume you are already comfortable with the Oracle GUI installers, and will skip over excess details to condense this down into a single blog post.

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