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Posts Tagged ‘SLES’

Extending VMDK file and resizing the partition – SLES 10 Linux

April 7th, 2009 Comments off

1. ESXi 3.5 Extending the VMDK file [Virtual Machine Hard Disk]

The main reason behind this is the fact that I needed more space for 2 more Oracle databases on a SLES10 Linux system. The partition mounted on /u01 was initially created as 21GB but I quickly depleted the space with 3 oracle 10g databases that took more than 17GB and the space left was not sufficient for the 2 new databases that I had to create.

Before I advanced with the extension of the VMDK file I connected to each separate instance and performed “shutdown immediate” command as sysdba.
Then I stopped the listener, dbconsole, isqlplus and once I confirmed that no oracle related processes were present on the system I performed a shutdown “shutdown -h now”.

In order to extend an existing hard drive attached to a virtual machine you have to make sure no snapshots of the virtual machine are present. I know that this is quite uncomfortable considering the risky operation that you are about to perform but there is a work around. (The work around is not in this post, so please let me know if you are interested or simply search for it. There is a good chance that I will have an article concerning that topic)

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Oracle 10g RAC on ESXi3 using SLES9 SP5 – Part 9

February 16th, 2009 Comments off

Verify the Oralce Clusterware Installation

With the introduction of Oracle RAC 10g, cluster management is controller by the evmd, ocssd and crsd processes.
Run the ps command on both nodes to make sure that the processes are running.


rac01:/u01/clusterware/cluvfy # ps -ef |grep d.bin
root 4694 1 0 Feb13 ? 00:00:00 /u01/crs1020/bin/crsd.bin reboot
oracle 5242 4692 0 Feb13 ? 00:00:00 /u01/crs1020/bin/evmd.bin
oracle 5344 5326 0 Feb13 ? 00:00:00 /u01/crs1020/bin/ocssd.bin
root 20078 10946 0 09:44 pts/1 00:00:00 grep d.bin

Next you should check the /etc/inittab file, which is processed whenever the runlevel changes:

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Oracle 10g RAC on ESXi3 using SLES9 SP5 – Part 8

February 16th, 2009 3 comments

Oracle Clusterware Installation

Install the xntpd service and configure it.
You can use the Yast management console to do so.
It is extremely important that both nodes are configured to use ntp server and that they are regularly being updated.
If there is any difference at all within the date of all nodes this could result into inoperable cluster.

1. Copy the cpio.gz file to the first node and unzip the contents of the cpio file


#gunzip 10201_clusterware_linux_x86_64.cpio.gz
#cpio -idmv < 10201_clusterware_linux_x86_64.cpio

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Oracle 10g RAC on ESXi3 using SLES9 SP5 – Part 7

February 15th, 2009 2 comments

Configuring and Using Raw Partitions for the Oracle Shared Storage

For the purpose of my cluster I will use raw partitions that are shared disks on the ESXi host.
First I will identify my needs for shared disks and them will create them and format them accordingly.

After some high level overview of my requirements I have created the following list of required files:

asm01.vmdk = 6GB [ ORADATA ]
asm02.vmdk = 2GB [Application data]
asm03.vmdk = 4GB [FLASH]
ocr.vmdk = 256MB [Cluster Registry]
voting.vmdk = 40MB [Voting disk]
spfile.vmdk = 16MB [Parameter configuration]

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Oracle 10g RAC on ESXi3 using SLES9 SP5 – Part 6

February 14th, 2009 Comments off

Linux OS Parameters

Here is the list of the required parameters for clusterware and oracle database 10g

Parameter Value File
semmsl semmns semopm semmni 25 032 000 100 128 /proc/sys/kernel/sem
shmmax The minimum of the following (4 GB – 1 byte), or half the size of physical memory (in bytes), whichever is lower. /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax
shmmni 4096 /proc/sys/kernel/shmmni
shmall 2097152 /proc/sys/kernel/shmall
file-max 65536 /proc/sys/fs/file-max
ip_local_port_range Minimum: 1024 Maximum: 65000 /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range
rmem_default 262144 /proc/sys/net/core/rmem_default
rmem_max 4194304 /proc/sys/net/core/rmem_max
wmem_default 262144 /proc/sys/net/core/wmem_default
wmem_max 4194304 /proc/sys/net/core/wmem_max

In order to check the values in your system use the sysctl command.
You will probably get the following results from the default kernel configuration:

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Oracle 10g RAC on ESXi3 using SLES9 SP5 – Part 5

February 14th, 2009 Comments off

Configuring SSH access for the oracle user for Remote installation

Login as the oracle user and generate keys for ssh authentication without passwords.
I usually check the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file to make sure I have the proper configuration in place.
I usually disable the DNS check since it causes the ssh to timeout.

UseDNS no

Now I will generate the ssh keys with no password

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Oracle 10g RAC on ESXi3 using SLES9 SP5 – Part 4

February 13th, 2009 Comments off

Required UNIX groups and users. User environment and Shell Limits

1. Creating an oracle user, a dba and an oinstall group on each node.

# groupadd -g 500 oinstall
# groupadd -g 501 dba
# useradd -u 500 -d /home/oracle -g oinstall -G dba -m -s /bin/bash oracle

Reset the oracle user password to something you want

# passwd oracle
Changing password for oracle.
New password:
Re-enter new password:
Password changed

Check that the nobody user exists:

#grep nobody /etc/ passwd [I had to add space between the / and passwd since mod_security of this server would not allow me to post.. ]

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Categories: Database, ESX, ESXi, Linux, Oracle, SLES, VMware Tags: , , , ,

Oracle 10g RAC on ESXi3 using SLES9 SP5 – Part 3

February 13th, 2009 Comments off

Hardware and package requirements

1. Hardware

Here is a small list of hardware requirements that we have satisfied by creating our virtual machine as it is:
at least 1 GB of RAM
minimum of 1GB of swap space
/tmp directory is said to be minimum 400MB which we have spare in our / mount point

2. package requirements

Since time will be the most important variable for the Oracle RAC it is a must to have all nodes up to date using NTP deamon.
In my case I use a local ntp server and I configure the /etc/ntp.conf to poll that server on boot.
In addition to this I have added a cronjob as root to restart the xntpd service every hour at the twentieth minute, to make sure every node will be generally up to date even If I perform snaphosts and reverts forgetting about the time.

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Categories: Database, ESX, ESXi, Linux, Oracle, SLES, VMware Tags: , , , ,

Oracle 10g RAC on ESXi3 using SLES9 SP5 – Part 2

February 13th, 2009 Comments off

Network and hostname configuration of the nodes

Once you have converted the the first virtual machine that you have installed, you have a mirrored copy of it.
This means that the hostnames of the two machines will be identical and this has to be fixed.

Each Node must have at least 2 network adapters: one for the public and one for the private interconnect. In addition , the interface names associated with the network adapters for each network must be the same on all nodes.

For the public network each adapter must support TCP/IP. For the private network, the interconnect must support UDP for Linux. Gigabit ethernet or an equivalent is recommended.

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Categories: Database, ESX, ESXi, Linux, Oracle, SLES, VMware Tags: , , , ,

Oracle 10g RAC on ESXi3 using SLES9 SP5 – Part 1

January 21st, 2009 1 comment

Oracle 10g Real Application Cluster on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server virtualized with VMware ESXi 3

The purpose of this article is to help people deploy successfully Oracle Real Application Cluster consisting of two nodes
on a VMware ESXi host. The Operating system chosen for the Nodes is SLES9 x64 SP5.
In Part 1 of this article I will provide the steps to install the operating system for the two Nodes.

1. Pre-requisites

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Categories: Database, ESX, ESXi, Linux, Oracle, SLES, VMware Tags: , , , ,