SYSTEM PREP
On my newly acquired Desktop at work (Windows 7 32 bit, 4 gigs of RAM), I decided to make a 11gR2 Database on an Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 Virtual Machine, just for the heck of it. I configured the virtual machine using Oracle VirtualBox 4.1 with the following parameters:
System Memory: 1G
Swap: 2G
Disk space: 25G
Network Adapter: Host-Only
I mounted the Linux CD image and successfully Installed the OS, keeping the default settings.
Note: SELinux set to ‘Permissible’ and Firewall set to ‘Disabled’
By default the screen resolution is low (800×600), however this can be fixed by installing Guest Additions, included with the VirtualBox Software.
DATABASE PREINSTALLATION
The next part would be to meet the preinstall Software requirements, as described here:
Skipping the packages, i proceeded to create the groups first:
$ /usr/sbin/groupadd dba
$ /usr/sbin/groupadd oper
$ /usr/sbin/groupadd oinstall
And the oracle user:
$ /usr/sbin/useradd -g oinstall -G dba,oper oracle
$ passwd oracle
To verify:
$ id oracle
uid=500(oracle) gid=501(oinstall) groups=501(oinstall),502(dba),503(oper) context=user_u:system_r:unconfined_t
$ id nobody
CREATING DISKS FOR ASM
I added a second VDI (Virtual Disk Image) of size 20G to the system, appearing as /dev/sdb. Partitioning has been done using the fdisk utility.
Setting 3 primary partitions (1-3) and 1 extended (4), i proceeded to create 4 logical partitions. Each partition is of approximately 1G, save for (4). The final result is as shown:
The ASM lib packages can be downloaded from OTN, specific to the Kernel ($ uname -r)
Installed packages using:
$ rpm -Uvh <1> <2> ...
After successful installation,
$ /etc/init.d/oracleasm configure -i
$ /etc/init.d/oracleasm init
ASM is now configured to create the ASM disks:
$ oracleasm createdisk ASMDISK01 /dev/sda1
Likewise for Disks 2-9. Finally,
$ oracleasm scandisks
To view the newly created disks,
$ oracleasm listdisks
All set for the Grid and Database Software Installation
ORA-13106 