Now that Oracle has taken ownership of VirtualBox, here’s one of the coolest new feaures. You can now create shareable disks. This means that you can create a Virtualized RAC environment on any OS that supports VirtualBox.
To be able to use this feature, you will need to run at least Version 3.2.8 of VirtualBox which is downloadable from http://www.virtualbox.org
You can see review the 3.2.8 changelog entry here: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog. More details are available at http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch05.html#hdimagewrites.
Tim Hall has posted an excellent article on setting up a Virtualized 11.2 RAC on Linux. I’m currently building out a Virtualized 11.2 RAC on 64-bit Windows 7 and will be posting notes on this soon.
Create a shareable disk:
VBoxManage.exe createhd --filename --size --format VDI --variant Fixed --type shareable --remember
Attach a disk to a guest:
VBoxManage.exe storageattach --storagectl "SATA Controller" --port --device --type hdd --medium
Note: The online documentation does not show the added "shareable" parameter at: http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch08.html#vboxmanage-createvdi . You can however see this by using the built-in syntax help for the command.
