This manual is intended to be a complete “cookbook” and therefore attempts to eliminate the need to read other Oracle or RHEL installation manuals. All steps to successfully install and instantiate an Oracle 10gRAC cluster on GFS6/CS4 are contained in this manual.

Oracle is a very complex product and many permutations on installation are possible. The description of the sample cluster provides a rationale for many of the best practices that are being deployed. Oracle RAC can be installed for HA, for scalability, or to realize the cost savings of using a commodity RHEL enterprise computing platform. This sample four-node cluster will provide some degree of high-avilability (HA) and scalability, but as always, the degree to which these are realized is highly dependent on the mid-tier application architecture.

Referring to other manuals should not be necessary because all the information you need is in this document. However, if you would like to learn how to customize your installation, there are Notes and Tips throughout the document to provide some detail into why certain decisions were made for this sample cluster. For further optional reading: