Andreas' Adventures

Today I decided to abandon Oracle VM and move back to VMWare. A while ago I bought my old 4GB laptop from my company, when I was given a new one. I added a 1TB disk and installed Oracle VM 2.2 on it. There are some quirks with Oracle VM when it comes to support low end systems. First of all the system is memory bound quite fast. See an earlier post of me (http://achatzia.blogspot.com/2010/05/oracle-vm-memory-issue.html) to see how Oracle VM treats it memory. The second main issue is the problem with external USB2.0 devices. I ended up rebooting an image quite often as the SCSI drive was declared dead. I worked with VMWare since about 6 years, and only had lost one image - a colleague disconnected my external drive which resulted in a corrupt Oracle database. With Oracle VM I never had that stability. So for me it is good-bye OVM, and welcome back VMWare Server. Obviously the VMWare Server will run on a Linux host with Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 .

Sometimes you just need a system to be gone immediately. And with immediately I mean NOW. The moment I do something it should be gone. This comes in quite handy when you work in an environment that offers High Availability, such as an Oracle RAC, and you need to test a failover or a node crash. The same applies to a middle tier that runs the Oracle Application Server on multiple machines. Well, if you want to do this you can use these handy commands: [root@mymachine] cd /proc [root@mymachine] echo c > sysrq-trigger Of course you must be root to write into that file. And be aware, you must have (physical) access to the machine as you really need to boot it again. This can be done by pressing the button, or if you use virtualization or any ILO-tool by the available interface.