How to run Oracle in AWS with Zadara Storage

This article provides step by step instructions on how to run an Oracle instance with Zadara Storage at AWS.



It assumes a Zadara account and a VPSA have already been created. If you need to create a Zadara account, please visit the link below:

https://www.zadarastorage.com/how-to-create-a-zadara-cloud-block-storage-at-amazon-aws-ec2/

Once the Zadara account and VPSA are created, it is time to create your Oracle environment.

Launch an Oracle instance

  • Login into the AWS cloud console
  • Launch a new instance using Classic Wizard
  • Choose one of the pre-created Oracle AMIs:
    • In the “Community AMIs” tab, select “Instance Store Images” and search for “oracle”
    • Sort the list of images by Manifest
    • Pick any AMI published by oracle-corporation, for example:
      • ami-27d43a4e, oracle-corporation-linux-us-east-1/enterprise-linux-ami/64-bit/OEL5.5-x86_64.img.manifest

Note: you can pick any other image published by third parties as well.


  • Select desired Instance type and VPC subnet
  • If your AMI is pre-configured to use EBS or Instance Store volumes, remove all of them.

Note: Don’t add EBS/Instance Store volumes to this Oracle VM as they may conflict with iSCSI volumes

  • Complete the instance creation wizard by specifying the appropriate key pair and security group.
  • Review the data and click Launch.
  • Please note that some instance types are not supported with VPC in some zones. If your wizard returned an error, try to change the instance type.
Mount VPSA volumes to an Oracle instance
  • Connect to your instance using ssh (if needed assign an Elastic IP to connect from outside of the cloud)
  • Install and start iSCSI Initiator
    • sudo yum install iscsi-initiator-utils
    • sudo service iscsi start
  • Some AMIs have no public Oracle yum repository configured. If your AMI is one of these, setup the repository and repeat the previous step. For Oracle EL 5.x it will be:
    • sudo wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/public-yum-el5.repo http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-el5.repo
  • At this point, iSCSI Initiator is installed. The next step will be to configure iSCSI session between your instance and the VPSA. The easiest way to do it will be using VPSA’s Connect script.
    • Go to VPSA GUI / Servers section and click Connect
    • Select Linux and iSCSI (you will see the instructions you need to run on the VM to connect to the VPSA)
    • Go back to your Oracle server and follow the instructions from the VPSA GUI:
      • Get the script, change mode for execution, run the script, select interface ID from the list
    • Go to VPSA GUI / Servers section and click Refresh. You should see a new server listed.
  • Go to VPSA GUI / Volumes. Create the necessary amount of volumes and attach them to the Oracle server. We recommend to use SAS and/or SSD volumes for Oracle DB data.
  • On the Oracle server, you should see new devices by typing:
    • ls -l /dev/disk/by-path/
  • Create file systems and mount them like:
    • mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda
    • mkdir /mnt/data
    • mount /dev/sda /mnt/data
  • Configure your Oracle DB to use mounted Zadara volumes

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