Working with Virtualbox - Installing Oracle 12c

If you read my last post (and I know you did), hopefully you'll have Oracle Virtualbox running an OEL6 virtual machine.

As an Oracle DBA, you'll probably want to install 12C to have a play, so go and download it from the Oracle edelivery website - and you'll need an ID.  http://edelivery.oracle.com

Obviously the best place to look is the Oracle documentation - here's the Linux installation guide:

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E16655_01/install.121/e17720/toc.htm

This page is a condensed version to (hopefully) get you up and running.

First, Oracle have very handily added a yum file that has all the necessary packages. Assuming you've added the public yum repository as in my previous post, type this to get it

yum install oracle-rdbms-server-12cR1-preinstall

This will install the required packages for the database, as well as create the oracle user, oinstall and dba groups etc (a neat trick).

Since this is an install on a VM, you can skip a lot of the pre-installation tasks.

Make the directories as root:

mkdir -p /u01
mkdir -p /u01/app
mkdir -p /u01/app/oracle
chown -R oracle:oinstall /u01/app/oracle
chmod -R 775 /u01/app/oracle

Change the oracle user password

passwd oracle

Copy the 12c database software to a temporary directory and unzip it as oracle.

At this point I ran out of space in the VM so had to add a disk, so here's a slight detour on how to do that.

Shutdown the VM, then in Virtualbox go to Settings and select "Storage". Click on the "Controller" item and the "+" icon. Add a new disk with a reasonable size and restart the VM.

In an ideal world the disk would appear when you restarted the VM, but it's not that easy...

So, login as root, and do an "fdisk -l" and you should see the new disk, probably at "/dev/sdb".

Next, do "fdisk /dev/sdb" and you should see a command prompt. Enter "n" to create a new disk, then "p" to make it a primary partition. Choose "2", then enter, then enter at the cylinder prompts and it should come back to the command prompt. Enter 'w' to create it.

However, it needs to be formatted, so exit from the fdisk command if not already, then type

mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdb

If it prompts you to proceed, enter 'y' (it's only a VM, what's the worst that could happen?)

Remove the "/u01 directory created earlier, and mount this new disk as /u01:

mkdir /u01
mount /dev/sdb /u01

It should be there:

df -h

Add the directories again

mkdir -p /u01/app
mkdir -p /u01/app/oracle
chown -R oracle:oinstall /u01/app/oracle
chmod -R 775 /u01/app/oracle

OK, back on track. Download Xming, because the installer uses Xwindows - http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/

Install it and start the Xming server.

Open a CMD Prompt on your PC where Xming is running and find the IP address using 'ipconfig' - you may have a few show up, it's the one with "Virtualbox" in the name.

Next, sign on to the Linux VM as root and download the Xhost packages

yum install xhost

Enter 'y' when prompted.

Still as root, type export DISPLAY=ipaddress_from_command_prompt:0.0
Then, "xhost +"

You should see "access control disabled, clients can connect from any host"

Nearly there....

Still as root, type 'ifconfig' and note the IP address.
Edit the /etc/hosts file to look like this:

127.0.0.1  localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.0.5 oel6.localdomain oel6

Where the second IP address is that found from the 'ifconfig' command and the 'oel6' is what you called your VM.

Save the file.

Log in to the VM as oracle, export the DISPLAY variable again, then cd to the place you extracted the software.

Run "./runInstaller"

Hopefully you'll see a few "Passed" messages, then the GUI will pop up. Let it think about itself for a minute, then you should see the first installer window.

You should be able to take it from here, because the responses will be specific to your set up.