Oracle RAC 12.2 on VMware Workstation – Series Overview

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Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) is one of the most important technologies in the Oracle ecosystem. It allows multiple servers to simultaneously access a single database, delivering high availability, horizontal scalability, and load balancing.

In this series we’ll build a complete two-node Oracle RAC 12.2 environment using VMware Workstation on Linux, with shared iSCSI storage provided by Openfiler. It’s a lab environment – but built with the same technical decisions you’d make in production.

📌 A note before we start Yes, it’s 2026 and Oracle RAC 12c is already out of support. The goal of this series is not to recommend this version for production — it’s to share what’s part of my daily life as a DBA: learning, revisiting concepts, and documenting the process. If it helps someone else along the way, even better.

📋 This series — Oracle RAC 12.2 on VMware Workstation:

What Is Oracle RAC?

RAC works by having multiple servers (nodes) access the same datafiles stored on shared storage. What makes this possible is Oracle Clusterware – the software that coordinates nodes, manages resources, and ensures data consistency.

Core Components

Oracle Clusterware (Grid Infrastructure): manages cluster resources, VIPs, the OCR, and Voting Disks. It’s installed before the database and is the heart of RAC.

Oracle ASM (Automatic Storage Management): a filesystem and volume manager built specifically for Oracle. It manages shared disks transparently across all nodes.

Cache Fusion: the mechanism that lets nodes share data blocks in memory over the interconnect, without hitting disk. This is what sets RAC apart from a basic cluster.

SCAN (Single Client Access Name): the single connection endpoint for clients. Three IPs in round-robin provide load balancing and failover transparency – the application doesn’t need to know which node is hosting the instance.

OCR (Oracle Cluster Registry): stores the cluster configuration – resources, nodes, VIPs, services.

Voting Disks: used by the Clusterware to determine which nodes are alive. In a split-brain scenario, the voting disk decides which node survives and which gets evicted.

Network Topology

RAC requires three separate networks, each with a specific purpose:

Keeping these networks separate is critical – mixing client traffic with interconnect or storage traffic severely degrades performance.

💡 Real-world note: Setting up RAC on VMware Workstation has a higher initial configuration cost than pre-built solutions like Oracle VirtualBox Developer Days images. The difference is that here every technical decision is made explicitly — which makes this lab much closer to what you actually encounter in production environments.

Reference Environment

IP Address Map

Disk Layout

Required Software

Download everything before you start:

Oracle binaries require a free account on Oracle eDelivery. Search for Oracle Grid Infrastructure 12.2 and Oracle Database 12c Release 2, selecting Linux x86-64 as the platform.