Hi All,

I need to build a development environment with Oracle 11g Two node RAC. I was planning to use Oracle's VM (OVM 2.1.2). Does anyone have any experience with this? I am aware that from product certification perspective Oracle 11g RAC is not yet certified, but i doubt that it just wont work at all.

What i wanted to know is that how reliable and stable OVM is? The objective of this environment is purely for development, testing will be done on two node physical servers.
The server configuration for my OVM is:
Dell PE 6850
2 CPU @3.6GHz each with Hyper threading enabled
4 GB of Physical RAM
2 Hard disks in RAID 1 configuration which yields approx 66GB (OS)
3 Hard disks in RAID 5 configuration which yields approx 345 GB (Oracle)

Thanks advance.

Regards,
Dipak

Hardware seems to be good enough.

I haven't played with OVM myself but it should work. We have worked with one client in pre-OVM days on a project with adoption of XEN for Oracle OnDemand. In the end, this must have contributed to OVM. :)

Actually, RAC is certified and can even be licensed per virtual machine - http://tinyurl.com/dm...
But I think it will work with hard partitioning only (pinned or static with OVM terms?)

I have a personal project in the pipeline to build EBS R12 on top of RAC under OVM. Would be interested experience of others as well.

I haven't personally done this either, but Oracle does. They use OVM quite extensively in their hosting environment. Not sure if they are doing with 11 just yet, but I would think they are. I would think you should be quite stable for the work you are purposing. Of course your performance is likely to be different in this development environment vs the testing system with two real nodes. What is the production system going to look like? Is this just for proof of concept? or a real roll out?

I would recommend a minimum of 3 nodes, this is more realistic. A system with only two nodes will suffer greatly for performance if one node fails for any reason. If one fails in a three node system the performance impact will be much less.

Hi Ric,

Thank for your input. I agree that the performance will be different on this development server as opposed to test environment.

The production server is a two node RAC with 2 Quad core CPU and 64GB RAM on each nodes. I also agree with your comments about having 3 nodes, however, due to lots of other political reasons we will have to implement two node rac and then at a later stage may be in one years time, we can add another node.

For production we will be using NetApp Filer and utilizing Oracle 11g native support for NFS.

Regards,
Dipak