Oracle
11g Installation and Set Up On Sun's VirtualBox and Oracle Enterprise
Linux (Part 3)
This is part 3
of our tale of installing Oracle 11g on virtual Oracle
Enterprise Linux on Windows Vista. Stage 1-2
covers the installation of
Sun's VirtualBox and the configuration of the virtual machine. Stage
3 covers the installation and confgiration of Linux
on the
virtual machine for the Oracle database. This
stage covers the
installation and configuration of Oracle on virtual Linux.
Stage 4
- Install Oracle 11g on the Virtual Linux Machine
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Having
installed Linux on our virtual machine the next step is to
download and install the Oracle database software and configure a
starter database.
Should be a piece of cake right? Not so fast - there is plenty of
checking to do first as we'll see!
Step 1 -
Download the Oracle softwareThe
software is downloadable from the Oracle Technology Network web site
subject to registration and acceptance of the licence agreement. |
From this page, select the appropriate Linux version (32 or 64 bit)
and save the file to disk. The zipped file is 1.7 Gigabytes so
the download may take a while.
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Step 2 -
Extract the Installer and Other Files
Having
downloaded the file, navigate to the folder where the zip file
was saved and double cick on
the zip file - linux_11gR1_database_1013.zip - and
extract the files to a new folder.
Step 3 - Check
Prerequisites
Before
starting the installation it's best to read the Linux
Quick Installation Guide as this lists all the hardware and software
requirements of Oracle 11g. If the requirements aren't met,
the
installation aborts so it's worth taking the time to check them.
We found we were missing some packages so these had to be
copied from the installation disk and then installed using RPM. You can
check if required packages are installed by using the command:
rpm -q
<package name>
where
<package_name> is the name of the package you wish
to check. For example the command rpm -q
gcc
checks if the package gcc is installed. If it is, the package name,
version and release number are printed, if it's not installed the
message "package
gcc is not installed" is displayed instead.
To install a missing package simply issue the following command:
rpm -ivh
<file_name>
where
<file_name> is the name of the file containing the
package you wish to install. For example the command
rpm -ivh
gcc-3.4.6-3.1.i386.rpm
installs the
gnu c compiler.
Included in the software requirements are the kernel
parameters.
The only problem here is that the installation guide
gives different values
for a couple of the parameters at different points.
We found the value
for the kernel parameter rmem_default
had to be 4194304 and net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range needed
the range 1024 to 65000.
We also found we had to configure additional swap space by adding a
swap file. See The Red Hat Linux Customization Guide
for instructions on how to do this.
Step 3 - Run
the Oracle Universal Installer
Once you've
extracted the
files, checked the hardware and software requirements (including the
required users and groups) you're ready to start the
installation.
To do this either log in as
the oracle
user, or switch to the oracle
user by entering the command su -
oracle then go to the folder into
which you extracted
the files, change to the database
sub-folder, and then enter the command ./runInstaller
to start the Oracle 11g Universal Installer.
This runs a few preliminary
checks before starting the installer proper.
The intsaller takes a while
to start because it's a Java program,
so don't panic if nothing happens for a while!
Step 4 - Select
Installation Method
When the
installer starts, the first thing you'll see is this screen
asking you to choose an installation method.
Selecting basic
installation
minimises the amount of
work you have to do but also limits your choices. It means you
can't use ASM (automatic storage management). For the sake of
simplicity we chose the basic option.
Step 5 -
Prerequisite Checks
After you've
selected the installation method the
installer ensures that your system meets the minimum
requirements for
installation, including a network check. If this check fails you need
to cancel the installation and install the loop back adaptor.
Step 6 -
Installation, setup and configuration
Once all the
prerequisites are met, the rest is all done for you
provided, of course, you've chosen the basic install.
During this step the Oracle 11g Universal Installer stores all
the files in the right places then configures and creates and opens a
starter
database for you.
This step may take some time, but the progress bar will give you some
idea of how the installation is progressing.
Unfortunately for us, we ran out of disk space during the creation of
the starter database, after the Oracle 11g software had been installed.
Fixing this was actually quite easy - we shut down the virtual machine,
configured a new virtual disk and added it to our virtual machine using
the setup tab in VirtualBox. After re-booting the virtual machine we
used the Logical Volume Manager to format the new disk and create a new
mount point in the file system.
After we'd added the new disk to the file system we were able to
continue with the creation of the starter database.
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