Oracle XE 11g on Ubuntu 12.04 using Vagrant

This project enables you to install Oracle 11g XE in a virtual machine running Ubuntu 12.04, using Vagrant and Puppet.

Acknowledgements

This project was created based on the information in Installing Oracle 11g R2 Express Edition on Ubuntu 64-bit by Manish Raj, and the GitHub repository vagrant-oracle-xe by Stefan Glase. The former explains how to install Oracle XE 11g on Ubuntu 12.04, without explicitly providing a Vagrant or provisioner configuration. The latter has the same purpose as this project but uses Ubuntu 11.10.

Thanks to André Kelpe, Brandon Gresham, Charles Walker, Chris Thompson, Jeff Caddel, Joe FitzGerald, Justin Harringa, Mark Crossfield, Matthew Buckett, Richard Kolb, and Steven Hsu for various contributions.

Requirements

• You need to have Vagrant installed.
• The host machine probably needs at least 4 GB of RAM (I have only tested 8 GB of RAM).
• As Oracle 11g XE is only available for 64-bit machines at the moment, the host machine needs to have a 64-bit architecture.
• You may need to enable virtualization manually.

Installation

• Check out this project:

    git clone https://github.com/hilverd/vagrant-ubuntu-oracle-xe.git
  

• Install vbguest:

    vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
  

• Download Oracle Database 11g Express Edition for Linux x64. Place the file oracle-xe-11.2.0-1.0.x86_64.rpm.zip in the directory modules/oracle/files of this project. (Alternatively, you could keep the zip file in some other location and make a hard link to it from modules/oracle/files.)

• Run vagrant up from the base directory of this project. This should take a few minutes. Please note that building the VM involves downloading an Ubuntu 12.04 base box which is 323MB in size.

These steps are also shown in an asciicast made by Daekwon Kang.

Connecting

You should now be able to connect to the new database at localhost:1521/XE as system with password manager. For example, if you have sqlplus installed on the host machine you can do

sqlplus system/manager@//localhost:1521/XE

To make sqlplus behave like other tools (history, arrow keys etc.) you can do this:

rlwrap sqlplus system/manager@//localhost:1521/XE

You might need to add an entry to your tnsnames.ora file first:

XE =
  (DESCRIPTION =
    (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = 127.0.0.1)(PORT = 1521))
    (CONNECT_DATA =
      (SERVER = DEDICATED)
      (SERVICE_NAME = XE)
    )
  )

Troubleshooting

It is important to assign enough memory to the virtual machine, otherwise you will get an error

ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system

during the configuration stage. In the Vagrantfile 512 MB is assigned. Lower values may also work, as long as (I believe) 2 GB of virtual memory is available for Oracle, swap is included in this calculation.

If you want to raise the limit of the number of concurrent connections, say to 200, then according to How many connections can Oracle Express Edition (XE) handle? you should run

ALTER SYSTEM SET processes=200 scope=spfile

and restart the database.