Scared of RAC ?

I saw an interesting post on Oracle Real Application Cluster Database at Kirk'S Blog Who's afraid of the big bad RAC

Biggest challenge in learning / understanding RAC is lack of hands on experience because of expensive hardware, network cards, interconnect and cluster file system. In this and coming posts I'll cover step by step Oracle RAC installation and configuration on single laptop/desktop using VMWare Server without investing anything extra on hardware (using two virtual machines, virtual network cards and virtual shared disk for Oracle RAC database shared files system ).

Here are broad level steps for configuring/building Oracle RAC Database on laptop/desktop machine (without investing any thing on hardware).

-- Install VMWare Server on your desktop or laptop
-- Create a Virtual Linux Machine RAC1
-- Install Linux Operating on RAC1
-- Add virtual shared disk for voting disk, ocr and ASM
-- Add virtual network card for private interconnect
-- Configure network card and virtual shared disk
-- Clone Virtual Machine from RAC1 and RAC2
-- Configure User Equivalency and other Oracle RAC prereqs.
-- Download and install Oracle RAC Software (Clusterware)
-- Download and install RAC Database software using ASM

Download :
Download following software required in building your own Oracle RAC Database
-- Download VMWare Server Console
-- Download Red Hat Linux ES 3
-- Download Oracle Database (10201_database_linux32.zip) & Oracle Clusterware (10201_clusterware_linux32.zip)

Related :
2 Days Real Applications Clusters Guide