A little while ago I started and managed to get an oracle RAC template to run from cmwares ESXi.
The long story short is that I installed OracleVM in a virtual machine created on the ESXi with a 100 GB hdd.
So basically now I had a hypervisor running inside a hypervisor. Yes, it works just fine.
Then installed oracle VMM on another virtual machine on the ESXi.
Then I enabled promiscuous mode on the virtual machines private vswitch. Absolutely a must. This is a deal breaker. Unless you do this, you will not be able to ping from domU into the internet, only another domU or dom0.
Then installed the RAC templates on the Oracle VM as normal, following the documentation.
At this point I was having a working RAC environment, with the only drawback that it had the overhead of running inside a secondary hypervisor.
So nect step is to move the RACs out of Oracle VM and into vmware ESXi.
This appears to be trickier. I tried vmware converter on the running RACs. Node 1 I converted as is but then it wouldn’t boot because it was running a XEN kernel and that is not supported by vmware.
So for node 2, I rebooted into the non-xen kernel, the el5euk one. I had to manually edit grub to boo that by default because as it seems, nice little oracle VM doesn’t give you much chooce to see the booting process. Maybe it’s possible but I didn’t had the need to figure out since I knew how to edit the boot menu.
Then I converted node 2 and now when it boots it will eventually go into a kernel panic as, the only errors I was able to see prior to the kernel pani, it cannot mount the partitions.
I tried installing different kernels by using a centos livecd and chroot-ing to it but to no avail.
Next step is to modify the original rac2 to have a modified non-xen, non-euk kernel and see if that works. If I don’t forget, I’ll keep you updated on this progress.
