Hello,
although I have not a special interest to discuss this theme, I opens this topic in order to respond to Robert Chase's last post in the thread "A few questions about Gnome 3 in OEL 7" that is now locked as it has gone too far off-topic.
https://community.oracle.com/thread/3739107
Hope this theme may be interesting to other forum members.
Robert Chase:
"Very good question! Many of these products run just fine in a VirtualBox on a windows desktop. There's a very simple reason for this. These applications are not under the load of multiple users. I write a lot of technical articles and white papers for the Oracle Linux group and regularly install the Database, Enterprise Manager, Oracle Clusterware, OCFS2 and lots of other Oracle applications to do screen shots and terminal outputs. I do this on my standard corporate issue Windows desktop. Because I don't have hundreds of users connecting to my Oracle software creating load it works just fine.
Would this work in a production environment? Absolutely not! For a small testing and learning environment it works quite well."
Thank you. Well, your answer is exactly the answer I expected and something that I wanted to be said here. Agree with you completely, without exception or objection. So, if we are talking about VirtualBox and Oracle Linux with Oracle Database, all hosted by Windows real machine, we are talking about toys. If a boy got a 4-8 GB Win8 laptop from his father, with one terabyte disk or less, or even a more powerful PC Desktop tower, but wants also to learn Linux and Oracle Database, then VirtualBox is the optimal and most elegant solution. Furthermore, in many cases it will be the only possible solution.
But I do not have a laptop in my room (my wife and children have laptops), nor PC Desktop. I have a 256 GB Dual XEON Quad Core (16 threads) machine with eight multi-terabyte disks attached to 8-channel RAID PCIe Controller plus two external USB-3 archive disks. The system is dual-boot system where Windows and Linux don't share, but divide the system resources and have nothing to do with each other (except that windows NTFS partitions and filesystem can be seen in Linux via fuseblk mounting). 128 GB out of total 256 GB of memory is configured as shared memory (/dev/shm) for use with Oracle 12.1.0.2 database. The database uses ASM storage system whose software is installed in its own home and is owned by separate OS user account (grid:oinstall), managing 6 x 512 GB partitions (external redundancy) owned by grid:asmadmin. The database software is installed in its own home owned by oracle:oinstall. About 70% of my time in Linux I am working with bash and perl scripts, command line utilities, C source code and GNU and Intel compilers in pure text console (well, not so pure as it is frame buffer console). The X11 is started only when I need GUI and then terminated when GUI is not more needed.
Under these circumstances I fail to see any additional benefits, not to mention performance improvements, I would have if I decided to use Oracle Linux and 12c Database virtually, hosted by Windows. Instead of having one real system (Windows), and one virtual (Oracle Linux), I decided to have them both real. What's wrong with this approach on this hardware? I think - nothing. This is not laptop nor PC Desktop hardware.