Installing Oracle Linux 7 for DBAs

Being a DBA, it is good to be independent of system admin as much as you can because many times you could be in a situation where you need to install and/or manage the OS yourself and also need to suggest some OS tuning or parameter setting to run Oracle successfully on your system. Here I will be explaining how to install Oracle Linux 7 on a server.
For my server, the specifications are as follows.
2 CPU
4 G RAM
256 G Hard Disk

You may download Oracle Linux from http://edelivery.oracle.com by using a valid MOS username and password. Once you have downloaded the media, prepare a DVD and use that DVD for the installation, or if it is possible for you to access the downloaded ISO image over the network.

Once your fresh system boots with the DVD, you see following screen. First option “Install Oracle Linux 7.0” is by default selected, press enter to proceed, or you may want to test your media first before proceeding further.

Select the language for your OS, click Continue

Click on Date & Time to select appropriate timezone on the next screen

Select appropriate timezone, correct the time and date, and click Done

Click on INSTALLATION DESTINATION to perform the disk partitions

Your attached hard disks will be listed on this screen. I have one hard disk of 256G which is visible on this screen. By default the option “Automatically configure partitioing” is selected, but I am interested in partitioning the disk myself, so I select “I will configure partitioning”. Click Done

On this screen, you can select from drop down menu; the type of partitioning you want to do. Here I have selected Standard Partition option to keep the things simple. LVM is also a good option to manage partitions/disks as volumes; as it helps in future to extend the partitions by simply adding more disks to the existing partitions. Click on “+” sign in the bottom left corner to add the partition.

When you click on “+”, next screen lets you select the mount point type where your each new partition will be mounted.

I used 15G to be used for “/” (root) partition where my OS will be installed. Click on “Add mount point” button to add this mount point.

Click on “+” again to create other mount points/partitions.

I have created total 3 mount points, “/” with a size of 15G for OS installation, “/boot” with a size of 250MB which will contain the kernel image, 4G for SAWP and rest of the space I am going to mount on /u01 partition. You may want to create as many partitions/mount points as you want and also create separate mount points for /home, /usr or /var etc. I selected xfs file system to format my mount points. You may select ext3, ext4 or any other available.
Click Done.

Click “Accept Changes”

Click on SOFTWARE SELECTION to select what kind of installation you want to do

I will be running Oracle database server on it and I want it to have GUI and other functionalities which will help me to run Oracle on it and as a DBA to manage the whole server.
From Base Environment, I selected “Server with GUI” and from Ad-Ons for Selected Environment, I selected “Hardware Monitoring Utilities”, “KDE”, “Performance Tools”, and “Development Tools”
Click Done

Click on NETWORK & HOSTNAME to configure the network settings and host name

Click on the network adapter you want to configure, set Hostname from the left bottom corner and then click Configure button

Select IPV4 Settings tab and select Manual from the Method, if you want to give static IP – and then provide the IP address details, otherwise you may select “Automatic (DHCP) option for automatic assignment of IP address. Click Save