How to automatically build any recent version of the Oracle database.

There are many situations where you want to use a very specific configuration of the Oracle database, for example when a client has an issue and is still on EL5, or gets disk errors on a filesystem that is ext3, or is using ASM and gets weird IO patterns. Other examples are: you want to test the newest PSU to see if responds differently to an issue you are working on, or you want to test a combination of the Oracle database version 11.2.0.3 and grid infrastructure 12.1.0.2.

Of course you can just go and install a virtual machine, install all the different bits and pieces. Doing so manually kills vast amounts of time. By doing that, you will end up with a lot of virtual machines, for which at a certain point in time you have to make a decision to remove some of these.

Also a lot of people use a (virtual) machine with a couple of database versions installed, and test on these. In that case you sometimes have to ignore details like filesystemASM, or specific PSU level, it’s hard to keep that updated, but when a client case is in a lower version, in general you don’t go back in PSU level (although not impossible). One thing I ran into frequently is that it’s easy to get caught in side effects because of changes and settings made for earlier test cases (often underscore parameters).

This blogpost introduces my project ‘vagrant-builder’ which allows you to build a virtual machine with Oracle and optionally clusterware installed in any version you specify. The provisioning will download all software and patches (except for the 12.2.0.1 media, which needs to be provided in the ‘files’ directory) fully automatic for you. These are the options:

Linux version:
Oracle linux version 5, 6 or 7 (limited by boxes build by the box-cutter project).
The Actual versions currently existing are ol5.11, ol6.6/7/8, ol7.0/1/2/3. I am awaiting the boxcutter project to produce ol6.9 and ol7.4.

Filesystems:
Filesystem types for u01 and for oradata (when no ASM is used): xfs, ext4, ext3.

Kernel:
Oracle linux 5: latest redhat kernel, latest UEK2 kernel.
Oracle linux 6: any exadata kernel version (if made available on public-yum), latest redhat/UEK2/UEK3/UEK4 kernel.
Oracle linux 7: latest redhat kernel, latest UEK3 or UEK 4 kernel.

ASM:
No ASM install.
12.2.0.1 no patches, PSU: 170620, 170718, 170814
12.1.0.2 no patches, PSU: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 160119, 160419, 160719, 161019, 170117, 170418, 170718, 170814
11.2.0.4 no patches, PSU: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 160119, 160419, 160719, 161019, 170117, 170418, 170718, 170814

Database:
No database install.
12.2.0.1 no patches, PSU: 170620, 170718, 170814
12.1.0.2 no patches, PSU: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 160119, 160419, 160719, 161019, 170117, 170418, 170718, 170814
11.2.0.4 no patches, PSU: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 160119, 160419, 160719, 161019, 170117, 170418, 170718, 170814
11.2.0.3 PSU 15 only.
11.2.0.2 PSU 12 only.

Database:
By specifying a database name, a database will be created with that name. Of course the dictionary part of the patching will be applied to the database!

How does this work? This works using the combination of the following pieces of software:
– Virtualbox
– Vagrant
– Ansible
Plus the vagrant-builder repository: https://gitlab.com/FritsHoogland/vagrant-builder

If you don’t have Virtualbox, Vagrant or Ansible installed, follow the installation procedure in this blog article; it’s a bit older, so versions of the software components will be higher, you should simply install the latest versions. There is quite an important caveat (sadly): Ansible in principle does not run on windows. You can made it working on windows by using Cygwin, but officially it doesn’t support windows. If you can get the provisioning using Ansible to fully work on windows please share how you did that.

Once you got all the software components installed, another thing you might want to do first is to move your default virtual box directory to a place where you got enough space to hold virtual machines.

Then, clone the vagrant-builder repository into a directory (git clone https://gitlab.com/FritsHoogland/vagrant-builder.git myvm, for example), go into that directory and edit the Vagrantfile to set:
– hostonly_network_ip_address
– mos username & password
– database_name (if you want a database)
– linux (choose one by removing the hash sign in front of it)
– kernel
– asm_version (set a version if you want clusterware “siha” and ASM, if a database_version is set and asm_version is empty, you get a filesystem based database)
– database_version (set a version if you want the database software to be installed)
– vm_cpus (number of CPUs visible/made available to the VM)
– vm_memory (amount of memory made available ot the VM)
– vm_hostname (if you want multiple VMs, you need multiple vm_hostnames set!)
– perl_l4cache_workaround (if you got a newer CPU with a level 4 cache, set this to Y (yes), otherwise set this to N (no))

Save the changes, and startup the virtual machine: ‘vagrant up’. This will pull the operating system image, add a disk for the database, startup linux, setup and configure linux, download the database and grid software version (except for version 12.2.0.1, for which the installation media needs to be staged in the files dictory), install it, download the patches, install these and create a database, without manual intervention.

• ansible
• ASM
• automation
• grid
• install
• oracle
• vagrant
• virtualbox