I have been building a VMware vCloud environment in my home lab over the past few days, and decided I would share my thoughts with regards to using Oracle Express Edition with vCD.
Oracle Express Edition is based on Oracle 10G, but is restricted to one database instance. Anyone who has had previous experience installing and configuring Oracle 10g or 11g will know how much of a pain it can be, configuring to startup at boot time, creating a database instance, these are all tricky things if you have never carried out these tasks. Oracle XE however makes life very simple indeed.
I decided to use the Windows version, and promptly downloaded the required version from here. Either the Linux or Windows version can be downloaded via this link. Once downloaded there is a self extracting installer, run this and complete the installation (pretty much next next finish).
Once installed login with the SYS account and the password you created. You will be presented with the following screen:
If you select Administration -> Manage Users, you will see the default HR user. What I did was to create my own vCloud user specifically for connecting to this database from vCD. To do this click the Create button at the top right. Assign the Create privelages and DBA role to the account.
Thats it. So simple. You can now begin the installation of vCD. The database instance name is XE.
Thanks for the post! We were getting an error during the vcloud install about “object already exists” when we were using the system username/password pair and once we created a non-system username and used it, the installation then continued without an error. Nice work!