Moving to Canada… Oracle 10g RAC + Solaris 10g + VMware
Big news - I’ve got an exciting opportunity in Ottawa, Canada and finaly we decided to move. Quite a change as we were thinking for few years already to move to… Sydney! 
So quite an opposite place in the end with rather opposite climate. Once again I can see that my family is the best - they give me so much support here that no some are only dreaming about! Thanks to my wife Olga and my dear son Alex.
Alex Jr. is quite excited as he seems to be quite sure that bears are walking on the streets in Canada and he is going to ride bears overthere… also promise of snow, ice skating, skiing and etc. played the key role in his decision.
For me it was a very difficult decision as I really love my current company and the team I work in but this is an opportunity I couldn’t pass by. The interview (if you can call it that way) was quite a difference from what I usually would expect and I had an opportunity to chat with my future collegues and even customers! So I didn’t even start working but I already like the place. I couldn’t be mistaken - I know that feeling!
So I am looking forward to work with brilliant people at the new company on very interesting projects. I haven’t got much time recently to write here and probably going to have even less in the coming couple month.
My recent passion was installing two nodes RAC on Solaris on VMware - apparently this is quite a mission. I was thinking to combine my experience in a how-to document on installing Oracle 10g RAC on Solaris x86 with VMware. My current problem is performance - for some reason crsd.bin is spinning on CPU like crazy and I need to see why. So far shared storage issues are resolved, CRS is running happilly on two nodes, and Oracle installer is “hanging” in linking phase (well, all CPU is eaten by crsd.bin). I have already good start on the how-to document so I hope to have it ready some day.
Alex,
I haven’t worked with VMware in about 9 months, but I’m curious to see if how IO performance is for you. That was the biggest problem I ran into with VMware. the server was attached to an EMC DMX SAN and it could only handle 1/2 the IO of a physical server. Even if we turned off all other VMs. removing all other VMs got it to about 90% compared to a physical box, but kind of defeats the purpose of VMware. The host had 8GB of RAM and the dual qlogic hbas. It was really stange. We could move the luns over to the physical server and the numbers would be acceptable. We’d shut it down, move the luns to the ESX 2.5 server (same hardware specs HP DL???), rerun the test and the numbers were lower. In fact the physical box only had a single hba. Good luck with it. If you haven’t already found it, you can run a script on the ESX server to setup mrtg. It may come in handy.
Good luck.
Hi Steve,
Thanks for comment.
My setup is rather experimental home environment on small home PC with 2 GB of ram and additional disk to have shared storage. The perpose of it is to learn and play with Oracle RAC specifics on Solaris 10 - benchmarking is not a target here. Seems like just to make it run I need a bit more RAM and rather dual core CPU.
Cheers,
Alex
Hey Alex. I just tracked down your blog and will update my links.
I assume you’re going to work at Pythian? Hopefully that will work out for you both, but I have a funny feeling that it will.
Good Luck!
Doug
Hey Doug!
It definitely will!
Btw, your mentioning of Pythian interview influenced me in a way. I thought If you loved it than I must like it as well - we both started with Z80 if I understand correctly.
Cheers,
Alex
“we both started with Z80 if I understand correctly. ”
You certainly do
Alex,
You will like Canada. Nyet, nyet, nyet. You will LOVE Canada.
It is simply the best country on this planet. Da, da, Canada!
In Ottawa, if you like the blues, then you must visit THE RAINBOW BISTRO.
http://ottawa-blues-jazz.ncf.ca/indexbow.html
Welcome to Canada, Alex.
ziff
Thanks Ziff. I like it here. Most of all I like people. Though, living is not as comfortable after Europe. It does feel less… habitable if I can say so :). Oh well, it’s just different so it takes some time to get used to it.
Hi Alex,
I am working on Oracle 10g. I am novice to Oracle DBA side. Is there any good link which will guide me on Oracle RAC part. I want to configure Oracle RAC on Solaris 10 box. I want to know the installation details from scratch.
Is there any straight forward way to configure RAC on Solaris.
I am not getting any proper link for this.
Thanks in Advance,
Aravindhan.S
Aravindhan,
Apologies for loosing your comment for a while - just recovered it from the spam list. I probably need to pay more attention to it.
You might find this one useful:
http://www.dizwell.com/prod/node/235
Another one:
http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/misc/Solaris10X86-32Installation.php
I did have my notes but I didn’t organize them as nice understandable manual and by the time I could do that, there were few guide already so mine would be redundant.
I’m surprised you didn’t find those on Google.
Hi Alex, I don’t really know you but I am looking forward to move to Canada also with my wife and two kids. I currently live in Mexico and I’ve been working with Oracle as PL/SQL developer in Data Warehouse projects using Cognos.
I was wondering if you could describe how difficult was to get a working visa (or high skilled visa) in order to move there. How is the job market with Oracle & Cognos technologies? And finally how do you like to live there? How are canadian people like with foreigners like us?
I would really thank you for your answer. You can drop me an email.
Thanks!
Mauricio
Mauricio,
In order to come to Canada as foreign skilled worked, you need an offer for the appropriate position and then the company need to obtain a special permit in Canada unless it’s an exception.
I’m not very familiar with Ottawa job market since I was never really looking for a job here. I can tell you that there is very high concentration of government jobs - don’t know if they hire on working visa conditions. There is Cognos head office in Ottawa and I heard that Cognos is quite popular in government. That’s pretty much what I can say - the rest is probably your own homework on job search web sites.
Ottawa is very nice place - great as family destination. You should be ready for a dramatic weather change moving from Mexico so make sure you are OK with cold weather!
Heavy snow-falls and freezing rain is normal here.
Canada is a very friendly to foreigners. Maybe even more friendly than the US and Australia (two other immigrant friendly countries according to my experience). YMMV.
Good luck with your moving plans. If you have more specific questions - let me know.
Hi Alex,
Well, I think I can get used to the wheather in Ottawa, it can’t be so bad after all kids love snowing. Thanks for the information.
Take care and good luck!
Like shoveling? Right… maybe first time… max the second time but this is way too much I feel.
Jesus Alex! Now I know what you mean. I didn’t know the snow was that hard. How many days like these you have in Ottawa every year?
With best regards,
Mauricio
Well, this winter was a bit of extreme. “Locals” said that they haven’t seen that much snow for tens of years.
Visit http://www.oracleracsig.org for Oracle 10g RAC on solaris