Cloning FreeBSD Jails with ZFS as a method for provisioning Oracle 11g R2

A requirement more and more pressing in the current data centers is the ability to deploy applications and services quickly, almost immediately.

It is becoming increasingly frequent that the system administrators and DBAs maintain different versions of the same service or application to be used as production environment, testing, development, reporting.

In this post I will show, as the combination of ZFS and FreeBSD Jails can simplify these tasks to the point that are almost trivial.

Install Oracle 11g Release 2 on FreeBSD 9

We Continue providing functionality to our Jail Debian GNU / Linux just installed. For it I decided to install Oracle 11gR2 for Linux, because it is one of the most demanding software packages that can be found, I think it's a good way to explore the limits of the proposed solution.

Another motivation is the fact that in the FreeBSD HandBook  the chapter  dedicated to installing Oracle is referred to version  Oracle 8.0.5, which is quite old, this circumstance stimulated my curiosity.

For failing be certified by Oracle, this platform is not suitable for a production environment, which does not diminish the utility as a test environment and even a development environment for small projects, depends on the risk you want to take.

The advantages of using FreeBSD as an infrastructure for virtualized environments are:

1. ZFS File System.
2. Virtual network stack.
3. Network security with pf.
4. Dtrace performance analysis.

The advantages of using Debian GNU/Linux  inside a Jail are:

1. Debian GNU  is one of the most reliable Linux distribution and have a very predictable release cycle.
   
2. Using a complete distribution saves us a lot of work when you install Oracle.
3. Provide updated technical documentation.

As I am not in favor of installing a GUI on servers, especially if they have to support a database engine as heavy as it is Oracle, I will perform a text mode installation using a response file for the Oracle Installer.