The following steps were used in this configuration to set up the 3-node Oracle RAC database with Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager running on PowerFlex:

• Create VMs, one VM per host. Install Oracle Linux 7.9 OS.

• Carve out 3 x 120 GB disks, from Datastore1 to be used for OS installation for the VM filesystem, one for each VM.
• These disks are to be made “bootable”

Figure 9.   Disk being made bootable for OS Installation

• Install Oracle Linux 7.9 OS on each VM and assign IPs for each VM.
• Create the necessary disks from the storage domain required for ASM diskgroups DATA, OCR, MGMT REDO and FRA.

Table 7.      ASM disks from storage domains

• Attach the ASM disks to all the VMs by making them sharable.

Figure 10.    ASM disks being made sharable for Oracle RAC database installation

• There are 3 interfaces to choose from:

• IDE

        Standard interface connecting to storage devices. In terms of performance, it is slightly slower than VirtIO or VirtIO-SCSI

• VirtIO

        A para-virtualized driver which offers increased I/O performance over emulated devices, for example IDE by optimizing the coordination and communication between the virtual machine and the hypervisor.

• VirtIO-SCSI

        A newer para-virtualized SCSI controller device. This driver offers similar functionality to virtIO devices with some additional enhancements such as improved scalability, a standard command set, and SCSI device passthrough. Specifically, it supports adding hundreds of devices and the naming of those devices using the standard SCSI device naming scheme.

Note: The configuration in the lab used VirtIO-SCSI devices since it is recommended for better I/O performance.

• We recommend selecting high performance optimization for Virtual Machines (VMs). By doing so, the VMs run with performance metrics as close to bare metal as possible. When high performance is chosen, the VM is configured with a set of automatic and recommended manual settings for maximum efficiency. 

Note: For additional information on high performance settings, see Configuring High-Performance Virtual Machines

Figure 11.    Virtual Machines configuration displaying high performance

• Disable headless mode for each VM for optimization. Users can configure a VM in headless mode when it is not necessary to access the VM via a graphical console. By disabling headless mode, the VM will run without graphical and video devices. This is useful in situations where the host has limited resources.

Figure 12.    Disabling headless mode for VM

• Run the VM in a specific host in the cluster so that the Oracle RAC VMs are spread across hosts in the Oracle Linux KVM cluster.

Figure 13.    Selection for VM to run on specific host in the cluster 

• Install Oracle Grid Infrastructure 19c and Oracle Database 19c and create the database.