The next step is to verify that your VMware host
software settings are appropriate for your hardware capabilities and
software demonstration needs. For this, you simply need to visit two
areas for the VMware host: settings (general options) and virtual
network settings. The basic VMware options are fairly
straightforward as shown on the next pages in Figures 6 and 7.
Figure 6:
General Host Settings
You need to visit three of the five tabs to make
adjustments. Under the General tab, you need to set your preferred
default location for virtual machines (which you previously made
sure to exclude from your anti-virus and anti-spyware monitoring and
scans). On the Devices tab, you need to verify that Disable
Auto-Run on the host is checked. The performance gain here will be
minimal, but this setting can often affect virtual machine behavior
and stability.
However, it is on the Memory tab where you
need to most carefully make your settings selections. The reserved
memory and additional memory settings can have dramatic impact on
your performance results. My rules of thumb are as follows: allocate
no more than 75% of your total memory, and, if possible, choose to
fit the virtual machine into reserved memory without swapping. If
your machine has minimal memory or you need to run several virtual
machines concurrently, this may not be reasonable. You will need to
experiment to find your own sweet spot settings combination.
Now you need to define your virtual network.
While the default settings will work, it is worth taking a few
moments to master this section now since it will be critical to when
you later create pseudo and real RAC clusters on a single host
machine.
Figure 7: Virtual
Network Settings
In the next section when you install the client
operating system, you can start with the virtual machine using the
default Network Address Translation (NAT), which is VMnet8, so that
you can access the internet and apply any patches or updates. But
after you have those updates applied, you will then want to switch
to using your own defined network adapter in this case, VMnet1. I
am doing this for my laptop/notebook demo for several reasons.
First, as I said previously, later you will need to know network
settings for proper RAC configuration. But second and more
importantly, your scenario in this chapter is primarily for doing
demos. So you will not need internet access on the client OS install
and updates. You will only need the host and clients to have the
ability to communicate with each other. Therefore, you can restrict
your clients to a private network, which explains why you previously
chose to eliminate your VMware network adapters from your firewall.
Here are the steps to create your single private
network adapter for such purposes. First you need to visit the Host
Virtual Adapters tab and press the Add button to create your
network adapter (see Figure 8 on next page). Then you need to press
the Apply button, which will become enabled after you press the
OK button. The reason for doing this is that VMware needs to
create the network adapter under Windows as a loopback adapter under
VMware control.
Figure 8:
Creating Network Adapter
Second, you need to visit the DHCP tab to
define your private networks properties by choosing VMnet1 and
pressing the Properties button (Figure 9). In my case, I chose the
following network properties settings shown on the following page.
Figure 9:
Defining Private Networks Properties
I wanted my private network to be based upon
192.168.100.0 as the subnet. I also chose to define VMware
controlled DHCP management to reserve addresses 192.168.100.10
through 192.168.100.100 for dynamic address allocation (although I
did not actually use these). The reason for choosing these values is
that I hard code IP addresses for laptop/notebook scenarios. I use
the following IP addresses from my Windows hosts file off my
laptop/notebook used for doing demos:
# Laptop/Notebook Demo
HOSTS file
#
127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.100.101 linux
192.168.100.102 linux_10g
192.168.100.103 linux_11g
192.168.100.104 linux_rac
Since we are doing an Oracle 11g setup in this
chapter, we will be using address 192.168.100.103 with an alias of
linux_11g. The reason I chose to use hard coded IPs for demo
machines is for fast setup. I can copy my VMware directory to any
machine with just three requirements to get it up and running:
define the network adapter, add those IP entries to my Windows
hosts file (the steps we did above), and add the Oracle database SID
from the linux_11g virtual machine to my local tnsnames file. After
that, everything else will just work. Then I can unzip a backup and
get my demo working in a matter of mere moments.
Virtual Machine Setup
The only exceptions to Chapter 4s
recommendations are related to the virtual machines network
settings, such as specifying a private network (i.e. host-only)
versus using VMware sponsored DHCP. Since I know that my
laptop/notebook demo will only involve Windows host application to
VMware client Oracle database or another VMware client application
to VMware client Oracle database, we do not need to have internet or
public network access. That requires only the Ethernet setting
modification shown in Figure 10 (following page). We merely need to
choose a custom network adapter of VMnet1, which we defined in a
prior section. Also note that this setup is defined to run in a very
minimal scenario, i.e. a laptop/notebook with just one CPU and 1 GB
of client memory.
Figure 10:
Ethernet Setting Modification
This is an excerpt from
Oracle on VMWare:
Expert tips for database virtualization
by Rampant TechPress.
and include the URL for the page.
