On 24 November 2010 15:13, Scott Robbins <scottro at nyc.rr.com> wrote: >> Nope, all comes as sda/sdb etc. if you don't use LVM unless your >> external storage is funky. > Hrrm. Ok, this is installation on a VMware esx server, using, when > asked to choose guest, an oracle machine. Devices are xvda and xvdb. Aaah, that's interesting. I've done it on an ESX 4.x server but got none of those. On the other hand, I didn't say it was an Oracle machine, just a RHEL one (didn't found it necessary to distinguish one from other, we tend to deploy CentOS on our ESX server for test/dev environments but we have a couple of RHEL and OEL ones as well. That's worth trying again. :) > Along with, I'm sure, the OP, I want to thank you for this post, it > makes me realize that if we definitely do this for real, there are > obviously some things I missed. OEL is a funny one. The only reason it exists is to destroy the upstream. They're completely unlike CentOS in mentality. Their main reason of existence is cutting RHEL from support revenue. Our PHBs decided to use OEL for customers since we're an Oracle shop at work so getting all licences & support from a single source makes accounting easier. In any case, after a typical Oracle Enterprise licence calculation RHEL or OEL seems like peanuts. What worries me is with OEL eating the support revenue from RHEL and simultaneously being dependent on RHEL for upstream dev & patches, it's not a long-term viable situation, it's not even a partnership. There are other little things why we would go for OEL, one being the OCFS2 when we do shared-storage clusters. Reading the small pring gives you the impression that Oracle won't support OCFS2 unless it's OEL. I'm not sure that's true but hey, that's what's been decided at work. As I mentioned, the other funny thing is if you choose Oracle-validated package, it stuffs your sysconf.ctl with values. Then try installing Oracle 11g (R1 or R2) on it, the installer barfs up warnings about various kernel parameters being wrong. There's a public yum repo but as Alexander has mentioned, not much of a use. I'm not a big fan of OEL. I'd rather use upstream with paying customers and CentOS internally. Unfortunately this decision is out of my hands. -- Hakan (m1fcj) - http://www.hititgunesi.org