The Architecture is pretty much the same as this picture, which we published in the third article. We will quickly go about creating a VM and then clone it, create a couple of disks and attach them to both of the VMs. We will use VMware Workstation 5.5.1 for this example. However, you can use GSX server or even ESX Server, if you have some servers rusting in your test environment. The setup on ESX might be a lot different from Workstation or GSX server, as everything is done on the bare metal and a lot of the terminologies change when you go about doing your work on an ESX platform. I call it a platform as it is more like a very thin layer of OS on the bare metal.

Creating VM

Step 1: Create new VM, Next:

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Step 2: Select the Custom option:

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Step 3: Select New Workstation:

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Step 4: Choose RHEL4:

Step 5: Name and location on your Host OS:

Step 6: Specify the amount of memory to use for this virtual machine:

Step 7: Networking. Create another NIC, with the host only option, later and don't choose for vmxnet option, as there is still no support for vmxnet. Keep the default vlance option.

Step 8: Select Lsilogic

Step 9: Create a primary disk with about 8-10G storage and later create another 1G (matching your addressed VRAM) *.vmdk disk for swap.

Step 10: Go with this default:

Cloning the machines

Step 1: After having setup and installed the OS (don't worry, we will go in a detailed installation in the next article) you can stop this OS and prepare for cloning. The setup should look like this:

Step 2: Right Click and choose Clone:

Step 3: You could have also picked a snapshot, but since we are just getting started, you can pick it up from current state.

Step 4: Select 'Create a full clone':

Step 5: Done. Note however that cloning is a smart choice to make but if you are comfortable with doing it the old-fashioned way, it is up to you.

Conclusion: In this article, we started preparing our work for Redhat / Centos 4.2 installation for Oracle 10g R2 RAC. We took a brief look at the ESX Server and the promise of running and managing a full-fledged clustered datacenter with just a handful servers! In the upcoming articles, I will attempt to illustrate a typical ESX setup as well. In the next article, we will install the OS and prepare it for Clusterware setup. (I will also try to push in some articles occasionally on general RAC performance testing and monitoring for the impatient.)

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