One of the things I love about VMware’s support site is their knowledge base. It’s not horrific flash like My Oracle Support (aka Metalink), and it’s freely searchable without a support contract. Also very cool is there is an RSS feed of new or updated knowledge base articles. It’s good to scan in an idle moment or two each day to have an idea of what issues other people are seeing.
Because of that RSS feed, I came across three knowledge base articles I’d like to highlight here:
KB Article 1023696: Oracle 11G R2 32 bit client fails with a segmentation fault when run in a RHEL 5.4 64 bit virtual machine
In this case, sqlplus would seg fault when you try running it. The issue it turns out isn’t a VMware issue – it’s an Oracle bug when running 32-bit 11gR2 client on a 64-bit RH OS with an AMD processor. The fix is Oracle patch 8670579.
KB Article: 1023898
RedHat and CentOS virtual machine show warning messages when starting the udev daemon
This issue actually cropped up in my VMware environments awhile ago. Basically you see messages like this when your VM starts:
udevd[572]: add_to_rules: unknown key ‘SUBSYSTEMS’
udevd[572]: add_to_rules: unknown key ‘ATTRS{vendor}’
udevd[572]: add_to_rules: unknown key ‘ATTRS{model}’
udevd[572]: add_to_rules: unknown key ‘SUBSYSTEMS’
udevd[572]: add_to_rules: unknown key ‘ATTRS{vendor}’
udevd[572]: add_to_rules: unknown key ‘ATTRS{model}’
On RHEL, the fix is to do the following
vi /etc/udev/rules.d/99-vmware-scsi-udev.rule
change
ACTION==”add”, BUS==”scsi”, SYSFS{vendor}==”VMware, ” , SYSFS{model}==”VMware Virtual S”, RUN+=”/bin/sh -c ‘echo 180 >/sys$DEVPATH/device/timeout'”
To:
ACTION==”add”, BUS==”scsi”, SYSFS{vendor}==”VMware ” , SYSFS{model}==”Virtual disk “, RUN+=”/bin/sh -c ‘echo 180 >/sys$DEVPATH/device/timeout'”
and then reboot the VM.
The final article I want to mention is
KB Article: 1023185 VMware Tools installation fails to start the guest operating system daemon on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 64-bit guests with the 32-bit glibc-common package installed
This issue relates to Oracle because 32-bit glibc-common is frequently required for Oracle DB installs. The issue occurs because VMware tools configuration is looking for the 64-bit tools (64-bit OS, generally you’d want to install the 64-bit RPMs…). The solution is to install VMware tools as normal, but before running the configuration script, to issue
ln –s /usr/lib/vmware-tools/lib64/libdnet.so.1/libdnet.so.1 /lib64/libdnet.so.1
ln –s /usr/lib/vmware-tools/lib64/libproc-3.2.7.so/libproc-3.2.7.so /lib64/libproc-3.2.7.so
and then run the configuration program for vmware tools
/usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl
Hopefully this is helpful to other Oracle on RHEL under VMware people out there.