Introduction

In previous posts, I talked about a customer where I needed to do a silent installation of the Grid Infrastructure and Database, as well as the post installation configuration steps. For that particular customer, I didn’t create an empty database but used RMAN to duplicate the existing database. But what about if you want to create a new listener and database in silent mode as well? That’s what this post covers.

Introduction

This is the third article in a series of blog posts on building a test environment to closely match a Production environment so we could then upgrade the test environment from Oracle Database 12.1 to Oracle Database 12.2. In the first post, I covered performing a silent installation of the grid infrastructure software. In the second post, I followed that by performing a similar silent installation of the RDBMS software. In this post, I’ll be covering the rest of the configuration work for this environment.

Introduction

In my last post, I walked you through the silent installation of the Grid Infrastructure software. In this post, we’re moving on to the next stage of the environment build for this customer, doing a silent installation of the RDBMS software.

RDBMS Installation

The silent installation of the RDBMS software is fairly similar to that of the Grid Infrastructure software. You create a response file that contains the responses you would normally provide interactively, and use that with the runInstaller program to perform the installation. The response file I used for that is as follows:

Introduction

Recently I had a requirement to install the Grid Infrastructure and Oracle RDBMS on a completely new VM. The customer I was doing this work for wanted to take a copy of their Production environment to another server so they could test an upgrade of their existing environment from Oracle GI / RDBMS 12.1 to 12.2. So they built a VM for me, copied the 12.1 installation media for both GI and the RDBMS and said “Go for it!”

I decided to log everything I did and write a series of blog posts based on my experience, in case it was of use to others. There were a few issues I needed to deal with for this customer. Some of those issues were:

If you’ve stumbled across this blog trying to get started with a local installation of Oracle database for some personal development, then firstly, welcome!

Secondly, it can be a little daunting to get up to speed, so here’s a little video that will walk though the process of download, installing and getting up and running with Oracle database on a Windows laptop/desktop. It’s a lot easier than you think.

Prometheus is an open source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally build at Soundcloud. This blogpost shows how to install the needed components to do visualisation of linux system statistics via Grafana.

The setup consists of 3 components:
– node_exporter, an exporter of system and hardware metrics.
– prometheus, a metric collection and persistence layer.
– grafana, the visualisation layer.

1. Preparation
The needed components are installed in the home directory of the user ‘prometheus’. In order for that user exist, it must obviously first be created:

This is a blogpost about how I setup my test virtual machines. The seasoned sysadmin and DBA will notice that the techniques used here are perfectly usable for real production environments. The most important thing is there is no need to download or stage any software for installing the virtual machine, everything is downloaded when needed during installation. Obviously this works best when you have got reasonable bandwidth available for connecting to the internet.

The main infrastructure software components of this setup are:
– Virtualbox as the virtualisation software.
– Ansible as the configuration and management engine.
– Vagrant as the virtualisation manager.

A few months ago I mentioned doing some Fedora 22 installations. At the time I did some pre-emptive installations on the Alpha release of Fedora 23 also.

Now the final release of Fedora 23 is out, I’ve run through the articles again to make sure things are all ship-shape.

As always, installations of Oracle server products on Fedora are not a great idea, as explained here.

• Do not install Oracle on Fedora before reading this!

I was reading some stuff about the Fedora 23 Alpha and realised Fedora 22 had passed me by. Not sure how I missed that.

Anyway, I did a run through of the usual play stuff.

This post looks like I am jumping on the bandwagon of IT orchestration like a lot of people are doing. Maybe I should say ‘except for (die hard) Oracle DBA’s’. Or maybe not, it up to you to decide.

Most people who are interested in IT in general will have noticed IT orchestration has gotten attention, especially in the form of Puppet and/or Chef. I _think_ IT orchestration has gotten important with the rise of “web scale” (scaling up and down applications by adding virtual machines to horizontal scale resource intensive tasks), in order to provision/configure the newly added machines without manual intervention, and people start picking it up now to use it for more tasks than provisioning of virtual machines for web applications.