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Oracle 10g RAC on ESXi3 using SLES9 SP5 – Part 10

February 20th, 2009

When I finished the clusterware install in the lab environment I have continued with the database software itself but it appears that I needed a VMware ESXi Update 3 required! The kernel version of SLES failed verification and upon an upgrade of the kernel through YAST both machines were unusable since they would not boot.

This is an obstacle until completed since I can’t continue with the How-to until this is done.

In Part 9 of the Oracle RAC How-to we have completed successfully the installation of the Oracle Clusterware services on the shared storage for the two Suse Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP5 nodes.

Before you continue with the installation of the Oracle ASM and Database software we must make sure that our ESXi host is updated to at least VMware ESXi Server v3.5 Update 3.

The reason for this is the required kernel update of the two nodes before we continue our installation.
If you are not on the version of ESX or ESXi listed above the Linux virtual machines will not boot upon the kernel update and the following error message will be present:

SLES9 Boot Error

When I was doing this Oracle RAC installation for the first time I was unaware of this issue and The ESXi server was the following version:

VMWare ESXi Server v3.5 Update 2 Release build-110271 Aug 12 2008

Information on ESX and ESXi update you can find on the following VMware website location:

VMware ESX Server 3.5 Update 3 Release Notes

Remember! Since you have shared storage attached to your cluster nodes you are unable to take snaphosts of the systems before you perform any kernel updates. The default kernel version of SLES9 SP5 x64 is 2.6.5-7.97-smp

The recommended kernel version for SLES9 SP5 x64 required to continue with the installation of the Oracle Database software is 2.6.5-7.315-smp!

Do not continue with the following parts of the tutorial before you have completed the ESXi update, since you might render your nodes unusable/hard to resque..

If you have the time and will to do so, please post comments on the results you have achieved or write me an e-mail with so I can post information about this. I would not want to waste your time with tutorial that does not work so please help the others by sharing your experience with this install!

  1. November 24th, 2009 at 07:15 | #1

    I am looking forward to read your next part “Installing the database”. I installed Oracel-RAC 10.2.0.1 on SLES-10-SP3 and VMware ESX 3.5U4. Up to this part everything works fine, but now i have a problem installing the database software. Some people have the same issue: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/164967

    Maybe you had the same problem and you found a solution?

  2. December 15th, 2009 at 14:11 | #2

    Hello Phimic,

    I have resolved this some time ago by selecting the ASM disks to be added to each note on a separate SCSI controller (1:0) through (1:5) the disk type is “Independent” and Persist.
    This way the cluster services are able to perform consistent tasks and the actual node is not affected by this. Usually the crs will try to restart the machine if the node fails and this could be due to the ASM storage. Please let me know if you have a problem setting this up. (Unfortunately snapshots are not available in this mode of work :/ )

  3. January 25th, 2010 at 06:31 | #3

    Hi,
    thank you for your answer, but i have tried those things already.

    After talking with the Suse and VMware support i found out, that the problem hast to do with our SAN Storage “SUN Storage-Tek 6140”. The disk-locking command of SCSI-II reservation protocol was not clearly mapped from the virtual disk to the firmware of the SAN. The solution for me was to use a local disk and a raw device mapping to this. I found more infos here: http://tinyurl.com/y9uje2h

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