Grid DBA

I started off my day somewhat later than planned, although I was up from 4:00 am.  Having been bitten by the dullness of previous day's keynotes I decided to skip this morning's session with John Fowler, Edward Screven and Mark Hurd.  My first session was at 11am so I decided to use the time and do some 'fun' stuff.  The DEMOgrounds was where I headed to try and bag some free swag before any cerebral activities.  There were quite a number of vendors displaying their wares - most of which were giving away some items in return for marketing opportunities.  By far the most popular giveaway item was iPads.  EMC claims that they are giving away an iPad every hour, with several other vendors attempting to follow suit.  I even had time to shoot some hoops in the Game Zone. After all the fun I sat in the the database general session with Andrew Mendelsohn - Why Standardize on Oracle Database 11g.  Andy kicked things off talking about new features in 11g...

I haven't updated my blog in a while, so I thought what better way to get things going again than post my latest interactions with VirtualBox.  Ever since the Oracle branded version of VirtualBox rolled out with version 3.2 on May 18, there have been many new features and improvements. Prompted by last week's "What's new in 3.2?"  Oracle VirtualBox Webinar  by Andy Hall and  Achim Hasenmueller of the VirtualBox team I decide to list   my favorite new features - Page Fusion, Support for  deleting snapshots while running a guest and disabling host I/O cache.  I listed these features as my fave because of their direct relationship with running Oracle Databases in  a VirtualBox environment and RAC in particular.  (I'll post a blog about my new Oracle 11gR2 RAC on VirtualBox in the next installment).  Page Fusion increases VM guest density via memory de-duplication.  In a nutshell it gives you the ability to run more VMs with ...

I'm getting ready to build a 2-node  Oracle 11gR2 RAC database on VirtualBox.  This will be another test of what I consider to be the best desktop virtualization software.  Right now I'm running VirtualBox 3.1 on MacOSX 10.6.2 host with 6 guests.  For running RAC however, I've discovered that 11gR2 is a memory hog.  So my puny 4GB of RAM on my intel core duo iMac isn't going to cut it.    Started the preliminary installation of OEL5 for the first node and Openfiler for iSCSI but will have to wait for the memory for the serious work to begin.  I'll be following some useful guides out there for similar setups on VMWare, Solaris and Oracle VM.  Haven't found any for VirtualBox implementations yet so this should be a pretty exciting experiment.