Building A Laptop RAC Installation Using VMWare

Mark Rittman's Oracle Weblog: Building A Laptop RAC Installation Using VMWare is something I'll have to try out. Pretty cool! The promise of RAC is intriguing - enterprise-class high availability and performance on commodity white box/blade server architecture. Add capacity at will, and pull nodes out and replace them without interruption.

I looked into RAC once at my old job and decided against it. When I asked our Oracle reps for references we could visit within a couple of hundred miles, they only found two. One had two nodes, one had 3, and both used nodes that had 8 CPUs and 8 gb of RAM each. Not exactly the commodity setup I was hoping for.

But the promise is still good enough to keep a close eye on. I asked a MS rep what he thought of it, and he seconded what I saw, that RAC right now doesn't fully deliver what it promises. He also told me in confidence that as soon as Oracle does get it right, SQL Server is in big trouble.