VMware: Oracle 11g Software Installation

When you reach step four, you will have an option to enable or not enable the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM). Since I work for Quest Software and most often need to demo our tools and usually not Oracles, I can forgo installing OEM. That saves both disk space for the extra data dictionary and SYSAUX tablespace allocations. Plus, it installs less Linux background processes to support that database. This second savings is what I find to be worthwhile if you dont need OEM.

When you reach step six, you will have three options for the storage mechanism for your Oracle database files: file system, ASM, or raw devices. As was pointed out in Chapter 4, you can shave off some performance on the I/Os via either ASM or RAW devices. But both options add additional levels of complexities as well (e.g. ASM means you have two instances running). So I generally recommend the file system option for simplicity and overall ease of space management.

On step eight shown in Figure 21 (next page), you will have two key options to decide upon: flash recovery and archiving. While these probably make good sense in production and/or test systems, for development or demo databases you probably can do without these overheads. So for my laptop/notebook demo setup, I say no to each.

Figure 21:  Recovery Configuration Screen

When you reach nine (Figure 22), you now run into some very important options that can greatly reduce the data dictionary size, significantly reduce SYSTEM and SYSAUX tablespace needs, plus radically reduce the time it takes to actually run the script to create the database -sometimes by a factor of two or more. Not to mention that the resulting database will require less overhead for background processes and significantly less I/O with archiving turned off. Again, for demos this is typically not a problem or bad choice. But you will have to decide based upon your specific needs. For most simplistic demo purposes, you probably can disable all these options as well as the Standard Database Components for Oracle JVM, Oracle XML DB, Oracle Multi-Media and Oracle Application Express. While DBCA will warn you that XML DB is generally necessary for other pre-installed packages, I have found that I can quite reliably disable this choice with no ill effects. As before, you need to decide yourself what to keep or not.

Figure 22:  Step 9 in Database Configuration Assistant

Youll next arrive at step ten (shown in Figure 23), a step where you are probably very accustomed to making some changes. I have three recommendations here. First, do not allocate more than 40% of your memory to Oracle (remember, you are doing a minimal install to get 11g running on a single CPU system with just 1 GB of memory). Second, on the sizing tab, choose a block size of 4K and no more than 300 processes. And third, open the All Initialization Parameters window and choose the option for Show Advanced Parameters making sure to visit and set values such as:

• auditing_trail = NONE

• cursor_sharing = SIMILAR

• cursor_space_for_time = TRUE

• db_file_multiblock_read_count = 2

• filesystemio_options = SETALL

• job_queue_processes = 20

• max_dump_file_size = 10M

• xml_db_events = DISABLE

Figure 23:   Recommended Settings for Initialization Parameters

That leaves just one key step to complete the database creation process:  defining all the sizes and database storage parameters for the default tablespaces created. This is the one key step you will not see if you choose anything other than a custom database creation. And there are many parameters here worth settings, as the table below details:

Table 1:  Default Tablespace Sizes and Database Storage Parameters

Note that setting all the above requires visiting each tablespace and data file in the tree and selecting both the general and storage tab for each. Take your time here because much of the above cannot easily be changed once the database has been created.

DB Auto-Start

Naturally, you will want to make it so that your virtual machine running the Linux client operating system and your Oracle database always auto-starts to keep the demo process easy. That requires just three easy steps shown below (note that for RAC setups this script will become a lot more complex).

1.      Create auto start script /etc/init.d directory/dbstart_auto.sh

ORACLE_HOME=/home/oracle/product/10.2.0/db

export ORACLE_HOME

su - oracle -c "$ORACLE_HOME/bin/lsnrctl start" > /dev/null

su - oracle -c "$ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbstart" > /dev/null

2.      Create auto stop script /etc/init.d directory/dbshut_auto.sh

ORACLE_HOME=/home/oracle/product/10.2.0/db

export ORACLE_HOME

su - oracle -c "$ORACLE_HOME/bin/lsnrctl stop" > /dev/null

su - oracle -c "$ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbshut" > /dev/null

3.      Then execute the following commands to set it all up

ln -sf  /etc/init.d/dbshut_auto.sh   /etc/rc0.d/K10dbshut

ln -sf  /etc/init.d/dbshut_auto.sh   /etc/rc6.d/K10dbshut

ln -sf  /etc/init.d/dbstart_auto.sh  /etc/rc2.d/S99dbstart

ln -sf  /etc/init.d/dbstart_auto.sh  /etc/rc5.d/S99dbstart

Conclusion

In this chapter, we created an ideal minimal Oracle installation and database creation for the purpose of basic demos on hardware with limited capabilities (e.g. laptops and notebooks). While the process itself was not that hard, many of the steps are recommendations for items to turn off or reduce from their defaults and which are often very easily missed in the haste to simply press next repeatedly to complete the installation and database creation as quickly as possible.

This is an excerpt from Oracle on VMWare: Expert tips for database virtualization by Rampant TechPress.