Add a Hard Disk in Oracle Linux Virtual Machine in ESXi 5.5

Objective: Add a Hard Disk in a 64 bit Oracle Linux Virtual Machine in ESXi 5.5

Purpose: To use the newly added hard disk as the staging area to store the Oracle installable software for "oracle" user. Once the install is done, I will delete the files stored in it.

Pre-Requisites:

a. A Virtual Machine in ESXi 5.5 running 64 bit Oracle Linux OS
b. VMware vSphere client 5.5 installed in a separate machine
 

Add a Hard Disk
 
1) Make sure the VM that you want to add the hard disk is down, in my case its node1.

2) In ESXi, right on the VM and click "Edit Settings"

3) Click "Add"

4) Select "Hard Disk"

5) Choose "Create a new virtual disk"

6) Provide the capacity (I used 5 GB) and use “Thick Provision Eager Zeroed” as Virtual Disk Provisioning Policy, which is suitable for clustering / RAC.

7) Use SCSI (0:1) which should be the default. [We have already used SCSI (0:0) as our primary VM disk]

8) Click Finish and then OK

9) Start the VM, log in as "root" and make file system

See if the newly added hard disk is present:-

# ls -l   /dev/sd*

Make file system on the newly added disk (/dev/sdb):-
 

# mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb

List the partitions

# fdisk -l
 

10) Create mount point and add it in the file system table so it gets mounted automatically during boot:-

Create a mount point for the new disk

# mkdir /sw_stage

Add the new disk (/dev/sdb) and mount point (/sw_stage) info in "/etc/fstab"
 

# vi /etc/fstab
/dev/sdb /sw_stage ext3 defaults 1 3

# cat /etc/fstab

# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Mon Feb 17 10:36:09 2014
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info
#
/dev/mapper/vg_node1-lv_root /                       ext4    defaults        1 1
UUID=5d6a7ff9-f5fb-4060-bed8-60d476acf210 /boot                   ext4    defaults        1 2
/dev/mapper/vg_node1-lv_swap swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
tmpfs                   /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
devpts                  /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
sysfs                   /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
proc                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
/dev/sdb /sw_stage ext3 defaults 1 3

11) Change ownership to "oracle"

# mkdir -p  /sw_stage/ora_sw
# chown -R oracle:oinstall /sw_state/ora_sw
# chmod -R 775 /sw_stage/ora_sw

12) I will be using this new disk as the staging area to store the Oracle 11g RAC installable software. My next step is installing Oracle 11g RAC database.