This article was originally written in 2010 and then updated several times.

In 2
010 the Virtual Box belonged to Sun Microsystems, now it is a part of Oracles too
lbox. The interface of Virtual Box has somewhat changed over the years so my apo
logies to the reader for screen snapshots that dont look exactly like todays versi
on. You can still download older version of the program so that chances are that
you wont encounter issues while trying out this guide.
Introduction: This learning experiment is about building a totally virtual Oracl
e RAC environment at home using only open source software available to wide publ
ic (With the exclusion of Windows, if you happen to use it. I wish there was an
open source version of MS Windows, that would benefit MS as well. Works for Red
Hat, right?).
My project is generally based on an excellent article by Jeffrey Hunter (and oth
er authors) Build Your Own Oracle RAC Cluster on Oracle Enterprise Linux and iSC
SI
Jeffreys article gives instructions on how to build a physical setup. I do recomm
end reading this article or at least giving it some 10 minutes scan before you a
ttempt to build a RAC. In that article Jeffrey estimates a cost to build a produ
ction RAC in physical environment between $20K and $30K. He shows that for the p
urposes of learning the technology a mostly physical RAC with some parts virtualiz
ed can be built for under $2700. I am going to take the virtualization to the ex
treme and build a RAC inside a single PC. Yes, I do not care now about performan
ce, and yes, I am willing to buy some additional memory for the PC. You can not
really expect to run two Linux nodes with databases and a storage (SAN) simulati
on on a PC with 1GB of memory. My estimated cost is, therefore, somewhere under
$100, if all we need is a memory upgrade. Sounds good? It is still a lot of work
and it will probably take you many hours to do it right. The benefit is a hands
on knowledge, which is priceless.
Now to the choice of hardware and software.
PC or server with some 200GB space and 3.5GB memory (XP Professional can handle
up to 4GB).
The host OS: Windows XP SP3 professional (although SP2 will probably do as well)
Has been tested on Windows 7 Home and shown no issues
Can work on Linux host machine (Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, Fedora etc)
Virtualization software: Virtual Box 3.1.2 (or higher). Tested and works with no
issues on both Intel and AMD processors (may need to adjust some CPU parameters
in configuration).
Database nodes: Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 update 3 as a guest OS, running Oracle
Database 10.2.0.1
SAN/NAS emulation software: Openfiler 2.3