Making a home lab to study RAC...ideas?
raindogNov 9 2010 — edited Nov 9 2010I've been a DBA for about 5 years, but in that time I've never played much with RAC. I'm thinking of building a home lab environment to play with it. Ideally, this would let me play with OCS and ASM, too.
Obviously, I can't afford a SAN, fiber channel, etc.
I was a former Unix admin so I'm comfortable working with Linux.
I was thinking one of two paths:
(1) Do everything with VMWare Player. My desktop has 6GB of RAM, so I could probably spin up a couple VMs and simulate RAC. I don't know if I'd need more RAM. I'm not sure how I'd share the disk (have to investigate that)...I suppose I could always fire up a third VM and make a NAS server out of it and put the shared disk on that.
(2) I have a home Linux server and I could build another small box. I'd have to share out disk somehow...NAS (nfs) may be the only affordable option.
Thoughts?