Category: Virtual Machines
November 12

Oracle Goes Virtual

This is great news! Is this great news? Missing out of being there (SF), I wonder what the VM core of Oracle is. Is it based on Xen. As can be read on, probably a lot of the oracle blogger community sites, Oracle is going virtual. It looks like it is a “bare metal” environment (it can be installed out of the box on HW), which also sounds like something from years ago (the “raw iron” project). In that sense I only can jubilate…

I am a great fan of virtual machines as can be read on this blog site. I revived Oracle 4.1 and Oracle 5.1 on VMware, doing almost all my testing on VM environments. Until now I always had some resistance regarding deploying project environments on VM’s because of Oracle’s licensing strategies and support regarding production environments. At least you are now able to choose for a licensed and supported package. If it will be a good deal, only the future can tell.

First Impressions:

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October 12

Going the Total Retro – Solving SQLPME V1.2.1 Problems with Oracle V5.1.17.4 on MSDOS

Did it. At last I managed to install Oracle V5.1.17.4 on MSDOS 6.22 under VMware Server 1.04. You probably think I am nuts. As someone said on our way home from Miracle Open World: “I would spend my time learning Oracle 11g”. Maybe. The person who said it, by the way, is an Oracle trainer, so what would I expect…

I / we (Bert Jan Meinders, an old colleague of mine) did our first attempt almost 1, 1 1/2 years ago. Our first attempt was based on VMware GSX software after we succesfully installed Oracle 4.1 on MSDOS. This was the first time (and until now the last time) I saw a total crash of VMware software. Oracle V5 was shipped under DOS with a memory manager called SQLPME (SQL Protected Mode Executive) V1.2.1.

This memory manager made extended memory available for use of Oracle software (database, forms etc), this way it could cross the 640 Kb boundary of conventional memory.

SQLPME was aggressive enough with its peeking and poking in memory that it crashed the VMware GSX environment at the time. Under VMware Server 1.04 it just hung itself up / nothing happened.

SQLPME crash

Click on the image to enlarge

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June 20

Reclaim virtual redo disk space; VMware Converter 3.0.1

I got a small problem regarding a acceptance environment build on VMware Server (currently version 1.02) on Windows. This virtual environment with, amongst others a Oracle 10gR1 database on it, was once build with the older VMware GSX 3.21 software, but the supported (and paid for) VMware GSX version has become over time, the free downloadable VMware Server edition.

When I started, I thought it would be useful to enable the snapshot function, so if an upgrade or patch process, for database, OS or application went wrong, I would be able to reset the virtual machine to it’s starting point and try again… I noticed that after upgrading the software to VMware Server 1.01, and after a while to VMware Server 1.02, that I couldn’t disable the snapshot function anymore because the enable/disable feature was grayed out. The VMware disks had a lot of REDO files, so I wanted to reclaim this space, because the SAN where the VMware virtual disks were residing, had almost no disk space left.

Normally, if the VMware Tools are installed in a VMware machine, it is possible to shrink the disk space of the virtual disks, but this feature is only available if, amongst others, the snapshot feature is not enabled. In my case, I couldn’t disable snapshot feature because it was grayed out and not clickable anymore…

So what now?

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