Comments on: VMware Fusion on MAC — Shared Storage for Oracle RAC

By: Alex Gorbachev

Alex Gorbachev — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:26:38 +0000

Your NFS exports are most likely misconfigured like exporting to wrong IPs and etc. The same suggestions to increase logging level would apply.

By: Venu Belpu

Venu Belpu — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 22:30:55 +0000

Hi Alex,

I’ve the same issue when I try to nfs mount. I get “Authentication Failed” error message when I attempt to NFS mount. Any sugesstions?

Thanks,
venu

By: Alex Gorbachev

Alex Gorbachev — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 17:33:30 +0000

Bruno, forget about RAC on VM with just 2GB. You want to have 4GB (you will struggle with 2GB).
I did install RAC with OpenFiler few years ago but there can be zillion things to go wrong. I won’t be able to dig into this now.

Another approach as you already know is to use shared disks in VMware Server for Windows and VMware Fusion for Mac (assuming 3.0 does support it). You will need configure raw devices indeed for 10.2.0.1 until you upgrade it and then can move to block devices directly.

By: Bruno Cantelli

Bruno Cantelli — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 17:12:47 +0000

Hi Alex, thanks for your fast answer. I use MAC during week days and PC Desktop on weekends, So, I´m interested in both solutions. Last weekend, I had spended 10 hours trying to build a cluster with Oracle Clusterware(on my PC). My problem is not the cluster, is setup shared devices to use as raw devices for OCRs and VTdisks. I have made the entire setup using openfiler with raw devices, Note: 465001.1 – Configuring raw devices (singlepath) for Oracle Clusterware 10g
Release 2 (10.2.0) on RHEL5/OEL5. This is because Oracle Clusterware 10.2.0.1 does not accept block devices mapping for OCR and voting disks. So, I setup some devices on a third vm with openfiler. Ok, all the steps were succesfully, including, creating raw devices with iscsi uuid, but, when I ran the root.sh script, which creates the ocr and format the voting disks, I just return erros. Have you ever expirienced something like that using openfiler? I´ll try this approach today on vmware mac fusion, but I was reading on net, and some people say vmware fusion 3 now can support shared disks, the only problem is that in PC I have a six-core cpu with 8GB RAM, and my mac book has only a intel core2duo cpu and 2gb RAM.

Thanks and Regards

By: Alex Gorbachev

Alex Gorbachev — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 15:30:49 +0000

@Bruno:
If I use NFS, I use it as shared storage for everything including voting disks and OCR. Otherwise, I’d place them on shared raw disks – I avoid OCFS2 by all means as it adds just another complexity layer without real need (in most cases).

By: Bruno Cantelli

Bruno Cantelli — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 15:18:18 +0000

Hi Alex, I have a question, do you configure the use by NFS and what is your option to OCR´s and Voting Disk´s? do you create a OCFS2 share and put those files over there, or is there any way to use raw partitions with NFS?

Thanks a lot,

By: Alex Gorbachev

Alex Gorbachev — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:11:26 +0000

Well, I’d rather focus on specifics and leave the rest as the homework for readers. :)
Btw, VMware Fusion 3.0 seems to allow shared devices so we might not need NFS to run RAC.

By: Ben Prusinski

Ben Prusinski — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 01:31:57 +0000

Alex,

Nice update. Its been a while since I visited this with Mac OS X and VMWare Fusion. It probably would be a nice addition to do an article on how to install Oracle RAC on VMWare Fusion with Linux guest OS and Mac OS X from start to finish. Since we have 11gR2 RAC would be worthy paper!

Cheers,
Ben

By: Alex Gorbachev

Alex Gorbachev — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 22:23:21 +0000

@av: the commands in the blog are to be run on your host – i.e. in OS X prompt. The host will be your NFS server — sharing NFS mounts with other clients (RAC virtual machines will be the clients). Hope this clarifies the architecture. The instructions on how to install Oracle RAC using NFS shared storage is a separate article and won’t fit into the comment format (and there are articles on the Net available).

@reiner: It will work on any device (granted, you would be careful what you choose for *production* implementation). In fact, Oracle released their requirements on NFS shared storage and you can use anything – Oracle will support you as long as the storage implements proper NFS v3/4. To troubleshoot you issues, drill into the logs of ocrconfig, check whether mount point is mounted on the second node and file is readable.

@Nde: when you install your RAC on VM’s with shared storage, you actually mount those NFS mounts — you would generally add an entry (or few entries in your case) in /etc/fstab. Something like:

192.168.115.1:/exports/raw1 nfs
rw,bg,hard,nointr,rsize=32768,
wsize=32768,tcp,actimeo=0,
vers=3,timeo=600 0 0

Again, the details of the install itself is a separate article all together.

By: Peter Shand

Peter Shand — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:27:15 +0000

Ben;

I had issues mounting as well, on Snow Leopard (10.6), however was completely unsuccessful. The error message on the Ubuntu client makes me think my issue is related to yours.

From the client’s syslog:
“ubuntu kernel: [ 679.768629] RPC: server –myNFSServerIP– requires stronger authentication”.

Does this look similar to your NFS issues, and if so details on your tweaks will be appreciated and used.