To get closer to the typical scenario (each instance residing in its own node) and accessing a (simulated) shared array/SAN, I have successfully been able to simulate this scenario on VMware GSX Server by following these steps.

• Get GSX Server Evaluation
• Get Plain SCSI disks (I have linked you too the site, scroll down to get the disks of your choice, I typically pick a 10G disk). Then all you need to do is to unzip it (it might take a while though).
• Install two (or more) identical OS’s.
• Edit both *.vmx files and see the following print dumps.

As you can see above, I unzipped one 20g disk and one 10g disk and having edited both the *.vmx files, I can see the disks available on both machines!

Shared Array/SAN on other physical disk: You can keep this shared disk on another disk to achieve better results during tests. As you can see below, I have it on a K:\ Disk while my VM’s are on another physical disk. Note: Do edit your *.pln file to point to that location or else you will get an error!

Conclusion

We are done setting up RAW disks. So is this really a Shared Array/SAN kind of scenario? Well you do come a bit close with the plaindisk scenario. What we will do is simulate the RAC by installing CRS (Cluster Ready Services) or Clusterware (as it is called in Oracle 10g Release 2), Install Software, Configure Listener, etc., Install Database, Add Instance using SRVCTL utility (which has a lot of fancy commands which we will cover later in the coming articles). If you do however want to install two VMware machines with a shared array/SAN simulated setup I suggest you follow these steps with the plaindisks (I will detail it out in other articles).

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