Synopsis. Oracle Database 11g Release 2 makes it much simpler to configure and incorporate many of the grid computing features that were only available in a Real Application Clusters (RAC) clustered database environment in previous releases for a single-instance Oracle database. This article – the first in this series - will demonstrate how to install and configure a new Oracle 11g Release 2 (11gR2) Grid Infrastructure home as the basis for the majority of these grid computing features.
It’s been a few months since I summarized the incredible array of new features that Oracle has introduced as part of Oracle Database Release 11gR2, and in that span of time, I’ve been experimenting with those features as I’ve built a new infrastructure for experimentation. Among the most intriguing new features is the consolidation of Automatic Storage Management (ASM) with Oracle Clusterware (OC) into a pragmatic and sensible arrangement called the Oracle Grid Infrastructure (GI). As I’ll demonstrate in this article, the venerable Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) utility gets a welcome update in this release, but first I’ll need to perform quite a bit of system administration work before we can invoke it and explore its new features.
First ... A Word About The (Computing) Environment. I’ve made some long-desired changes to my home office’s personal computing infrastructure so that I can manage my workload effectively and efficiently with my favorite virtualization environment, VMWare:
- I’ve upgraded to Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) 5 Update 2 (kernel 2.6.18-92.el5) for my base computing platform, a home-grown gaming server with 4GB of memory running an AMD Opteron dual-core processor.
- I’ve also finally moved up to VMWare Workstation Version 7.0.0 for all my VMWare endeavors, and though I still occasionally long for the freedom of VMWare Server 2.0a (as in free!), I’ve found that Workstation is just as stable and that it works extremely well with OEL as both its host and guest OS.
View article
Back to DBAsupport.com
