As I mentioned in Openfiler posts, until I can expose a block device within the Xen VM, using ASM to manage the files won’t be happening.

So rather than spin my wheels I have been setting up a NFS server to share the 147 Gig mountpoint /mnt as the shared disk.

Essentially this is the first part of the Oracle RAC on NFS guide. When I wanted a more indepth guide to setting up NFS Server and NFS clients I used this NFS HOWTO.

So I fired up my trusty CentOS 4 base install, got the necessary packages installed, made a hack to get a service running without the sunrpc module and bingo, the NFS server is ready for the next stage of the Oracle RAC build.

Helpful hints:

1. Install nmap and nfs-utils: yum install nmap nfs-utils
2. Add all the hostnames to /etc/hosts as it makes it easy to have all the config files using those names rather than hardcoded IP addresses.
3. To get around the nasty missing sunrpc module when you start NFS use this forum post essentially comment out the exit 1 in this line /sbin/modprobe sunrpc #|| exit 1 in the file /etc/inint.d/rpcidmapd
4. Add this line rpc_pipefs /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rpc_pipefs defaults 0 0 to /etc/fstab on the NFS server.
5. Always run exportfs -rav so you can get a verbose output for the directories which are going to be shared via NFS
6. nmap `hostname` is your friend for determining which ports to open from within ec2 security groups.
7. rpcinfo -p hostname will tell you whether everything is setup and ready to go.

The other benefit of course like the Openfiler, is that I now can spawn a NFS server node to provide extra storage for Oracle RAC and whatever else needs it, for example a shared backup location for temporary Oracle RMAN backups for practicing building Standby databases using RMAN Duplicate command.

Have Fun

Paul