Oracle RAC 12.2 on VMware Workstation — Series Overview

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Series: Oracle RAC 12.2 — Complete Installation on VMware Workstation

📌 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 guarantees data consistency.

Core Components

Oracle Clusterware (Grid Infrastructure): manages cluster resources, VIPs, 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 dedicated to Oracle. It manages shared disks transparently across nodes.

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

SCAN (Single Client Access Name): a single entry point for clients. Three IPs in round-robin provide load balancing and failover transparency — the application doesn’t need to know which node the instance is running on.

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

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

Network Topology

💡 In practice: In this lab, eth0 and eth2 share the same vmnet0 (Bridged) — VMware doesn’t allow two Bridged vmnets on the same physical NIC. Separation is done by IP: eth0 uses 192.168.15.170/171 and eth2 uses 192.168.15.130/131.

Reference Environment

IP Mapping

Disk Layout

lsblk may show devices out of order — the kernel assigns names in discovery order. Always use ls -la /dev/disk/by-path/ | grep iscsi to correctly identify each LUN.

Required Software

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.