18c Up And Running In 30 Minutes

The fact that 18c is available on prem is old news already. You might have thought to install 18c and start discovering the new capabilities.

And then, life happened. You got sidetracked with work and other commitments, and the only thing you did so far, you downloaded the software. And the 18c experience stopped here.

I started thinking what is preventing the majority of DBAs to install 18c? What is preventing you from installing 18c?
This is the list I came up with:

• you don’t have a Linux server to install 18c on
• building a Linux server from scratch is daunting, and time consuming
• you don’t know how to build a Linux server, as you are not a Linux admin
• you keep telling yourself you will install it when it comes out on Windows
• you are afraid that installing in on your laptop will slow down your system

I am sure there are many other reasons…

However, today’s post is not here to come up with more excuses for not installing 18c. Today’s post is here to show you how you can have 18c up and running within 30 minutes.

I was inspired by Skant Gupta’s article: Oracle Database 18c installation with Vagrant. Thank you Skant Gupta for sharing your knowledge.

Vagrant is a new technology, and from their website, “Vagrant is a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow”.
In order to have Oracle 18c installed, we will use the Vagrant software, and some files released by Oracle: Oracle 18c Database,with Vagrant boxes, available on Github for download.

This is what you need to setup Oracle 18c within 30 minutes:

• Install Oracle VirtualBox, by following the prompts in the GUI
• Install Vagrant software, by following the prompts in the GUI
• Download Oracle 18c install files (LINUX.X64_180000_db_home.zip)
• Download Oracle Vagrant configuration files from Github (vagrant-boxes-master.zip)

Once you have all this in place, you just need a few more steps to get going.

1)Unzip the vagrant-boxes-master.zip to a location on your computer, ie: C:\software\18c\vagrant-boxes-master

2)Copy or move the Oracle install files LINUX.X64_180000_db_home.zip to ~\vagrant-boxes-master\OracleDatabase\18.3.0

In this moment you are ready to start up the 18c machine!

Open up the command line as administrator, and check the Vagrant installation:

c:\HashiCorp\Vagrant>vagrant -v
Vagrant 2.1.2

change directory to where the ~\vagrant-boxes-master\OracleDatabase\18.3.0 location is:

cd C:\software\18c\vagrant-boxes-master\OracleDatabase\18.3.0

issue the command:

vagrant up

What happens now? It is all magic, I’m telling you!

Vagrant is smart enough to realize there is no Linux VM or Linux files, and it goes out to the internet and gets ALL the required Linux files to build the Linux VM. Once the server is built, it installs 18c, without any user intervention!

It literally took 30 min to have the VM up and running with 18c.

To connect to your new VM, all you need to do is: vagrant ssh, and then su – oracle.

If you want to check the status of the machine, just issue in the command line: vagrant status

If you want to stop the VM, just issue in the command line: vagrant suspend.

If you are curious where the VM file is located, then check out this location: C:\Users\YOUR_Username\.vagrant.d\boxes\ol7-latest\0\virtualbox

And it is that easy! No more excuses! Go install 18c now with Vagrant!

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–Diana