Tarry Singh published for Database Journal two step-by-step articles on how to configure a VMware Workstation (and GSX Server) environment to install and configure Oracle 10g Release 2 Real Application Clusters (RAC):
I will be starting a little Oracle RAC series with VMware and will be fondly calling it “RACing ahead with Oracle on VMware.” This first part is intended to give you a brief introduction to setting up VMware and the importance of other tools such as VNC, freeNX or NoMachine, PuTTY, etc. I hope that you will enjoy reading these articles (and hopefully start playing with it) as much as I will enjoy writing them (while playing with them).
You want to run Oracle on multiple platforms? You want to be able to install once and then go ahead and play with the database after having set it up once and not need to reinstall the software (especially on various distro’s of Linux where OS installations could take a toll on your motivation?) With the introduction of OPS and from Oracle 9i onwards RAC (Real Application Clusters), you are very curious to learn these newer technologies, you want to watch and learn how RAC works but unfortunately you just have one computer at home. Even at work it’s not just that easy to get a couple of machines , if not servers, to hook them up, build clusters and have them all shared Cooked or RAW via a SCSI let alone JBOD, SAN or NAS.
Fortunately there is an answer to your (our) prayers. Thanks to VMware, you have a technology that offers virtualization. I began using VMware a couple of years back. It started with a mere curiosity to experiment on other Operating Systems and soon enough I had Oracle 8.1.7 installed on Redhat 8.0. It was fun to see Oracle run and behave differently on a totally different OS and without damaging my current Windows installation. I also tried my hand a dual boot (using PartitionMagic 8.0) but it was way too complicated. There are however other products like Microsoft Virtual Server but we will stick to VMware as it supports various OS’s such as Fedora, RHEL, SuSe, Solaris (still experimental though), Windows. Check out this comparison of several Virtual machines if you are further interested.