Playing with Oracle ASM, multipath disks, TrueNas and VirtualBox — Part 1

PART1, PART2, PART3

I love trying things on my computer, as I don’t need asking some customer or employer for testing resources.

With that in mind, I was looking for an article on how to create a testing environment to implement multipath disks on Oracle ASM. I could find several articles, each one with some piece of what I was trying to implement, so I wrote this how-to, putting everything together.

The Environment

It consists of 2 Virtual Machines running on VirtualBox. Each machine has 3 networks, one for communication with the host (my computer), and the other 2 to be used in the multipath configuration.

Installing TrueNAS

After creating the VM, you need to add the network cards.

Network to communicate with the host machine (my computer)

Network to Multipath

Network to Multipath

We also need to add a new disk to be used as the ASM Disk Pool (20G).

Add the truenas_has03 disk to the VM

With the VM created, now it’s time to install the TrueNas software. We can download it from here. I am using the file TrueNAS-12.0-U8.1.iso.

Use the TrueNAS iso file as boot disk.

Just press enter

Choose 1

Ignore the memory warning

Choose disk ada0 (12G)

I am using the password “oracle”

Remove the boot disk (TrueNAS iso), and click OK

Reboot the system

Configuring TrueNAS

This is your first view at TrueNAS. If you configured the networks as I suggested, there will be one IP in the same network as your computer (host), and 2 others not yet configured. Let’s configure the other 2 networks. Choose 1 to continue.

Choose as above for interface 2

Choose as above for interface 3

Now we have the three networks configured. If your interface 1 disappears, after configuring the interface 2 or three, just edit its configuration and choose DHCP.

Now we can logon in the console. Just open your web browser and type the interface 1 IP.

In my case, root/oracle

Now, go to POOL -> ADD -> CREATE POOL

Create the Pool as above. Ignore the stripe data vdev errors because of having only one disk.

Add 3 Zvol of 5G each, as above

Go to SHARING -> BLOCK SHARES (SCSI) -> PORTALS -> ADD. Configure as above and SUBMIT.

Go to SHARING -> BLOCK SHARES (SCSI) -> TARGETS -> ADD. Configure as above and SUBMIT.

Go to SHARING -> BLOCK SHARES (SCSI) -> EXTENTS -> ADD. Configure as above.

3 EXTENTS

Go to SHARING -> BLOCK SHARES (SCSI) -> ASSOCIATED TARGETS -> ADD. Configure as above.

Go to SERVICES and enable iSCSI

Now we have finished the TrueNAS configuration, and the first part of this how-to. In the next part, I will show how to configure the iSCSI, multipath and UDEV in the database server.

PART1, PART2, PART3