RACing ahead with Oracle on VMware Series - Part 7

February 2, 2006

Installing RHEL 4.2 on VMware, Preparing Tools and Network Configuration

A Brief Pep talk: Preparation is a pain

I have gotten many e-mails from professionals and novices alike, and can fully understand the sentiment of taking all the pains of getting ready to install the Oracle installer (Clusterware is more sensitive to this), and then it just won't budge beyond an error. In one sense, it is good that you are not allowed to move ahead with a faulty NIC configuration but it is frustrating.

Therefore, in this article I will concentrate on these issues and try to cover all aspects of the preparation in great detail. If we cannot cover it all in one article, we will dedicate another one to it--but I will attempt to cover it all here.

Pre requisites for this article

I assume that you have:

• A machine with a minimum 2 G RAM (its helpful when you want to create a 2-node cluster).
• Enough disk space (80G is good).
• Created two Virtual Machine skeletons.
• One or more physical NICs.
• Read this article to get a good understanding of the architecture. And the previous article ( Part VI of my series) for all the tools and software you need to have in hand to go ahead with a successful setup.

Now let's get started with installing RHEL 4.2 or Centos 4.2 on our Virtual Machines.

Installing RHEL 4.2 on VMware Virtual Machines

This is not really hard work but let's just go through with this.

Step1: Boot from the *.iso file and after a series of 'next', you come to choosing the partition mode. You can choose Autopartition OR Disk Druid. It's your choice, I myself prefer to pick Disk Druid and then the first disk I mount from "/" and the other disk (which I allocate about the same space as my physical RAM) I set to swap.

Step 2: Here we will create and edit partitions. Choose "Yes" twice as we have two vmdk(Virtual disks).

Step 3: Pick "/" as mount point.

Step 4: Take swap as File System Type:

Step 5: It should look like this now:

Step 6: Setting up Network cards (Remember eth0 is bridged and the eth1 is host-only) and don't forget to keep the cards on vlance type, as the VMware support for vmxnet on RHEL4 is not there yet.

Step7: Setting private /host-only eth1 card.

Step 8: If you have your LDAP/DNS server (be it Windows ADS or Linux, it doesn't matter), then fill in your gateway information and DNS Server addresses. Eventually it should look like this:

Step9: Disable Firewall and SELinux.

Step 10: After about three clicks, you come to choose the software installation. Select "customize..."

Step11: And the following software is what you will need to select:

• Editors

  

• FTP. Legacy Server and Network Servers (Network server is only for VNC Server)

  

• Legacy Network Server we need for rsh and telnet (although we will also configure SCP, which is the right way to go).

  

• Development and Legacy Software Development.

  

• System Tools and you're done.

  

Start the installer and begin installation!

Post Installation

Having done with the installation, you will be prompted to boot. Upon rebooting, you will be asked to:

• Agree to the licensing terms.
• Adjust date/time and connect to NTP (Network Time Protocol)
• Adjust Display (don't do anything here; we will adjust our display with VMware tools!)
• Redhat Login, Registration and Activate (If you have a 30 day trial version)
• Create User (I always create a System Admin user here and leave root for only very important issues!)
• Install Additional Software

Then you get to log in, finally!