The Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) database enables multiple instances running on different servers to access the same physical database stored on shared Storage. The database spans multiple hardware systems and yet is displayed as a single unified database to the application. The physical configuration for this environment starts with the basic, four-node PowerFlex rack cluster shown in Figure 6. This architecture enables linear scaling of capacity and performance as you increase number of nodes.

Each of the PowerFlex node in the all-flash cluster was running VMware ESXi 6.5 and PowerFlex 2.6. Each PowerFlex node was configured with two virtual machines. The first virtual machine was running Dell EMC Storage Virtual Machine (SVM), providing both clustering and storage services. The second virtual machine was running Oracle 12cR2 database on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 (RHEL 7.4). Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) is highly recommended for database-related files. The vDisks presented to each VM are mapped as Oracle ASM disks and ASM disk groups are carved out using these ASM disks. The ASM disk groups are also shown in the following figure:

Figure 6.              Oracle RAC on PowerFlex rack