One of the first thing which may come to your mind regarding RAC is shared storage. Options which you could consider are : Fiber Channel(?), SCSI, Network File system.
Due to cost of Fiber Channel and complexity of maintenance and special configuration of Network File System,It looks SCSI is still one of the leading technology for shared storage. So it makes sense to use ISCSI technology for building shared storage area to make LAB also as close as possible to real world experience.
To do so, nodes are required to have ISCSI drive to initiate ISCSI request (Drives are available in Open_iscsi. For Target, you may use OpenFiler which simulates a storage component which has information that we want and is able to answer request from SCSI initiator (nodes).
If you use Oracle Virtual box like me, the challenge for quick setup is that neither Oracle nor openFiler has provided any pre-build appliance for Oracle Virtual box. Searching Internet and different site also suggested to install OpenFiler from its ISO image which makes the installation longer.
However, since OpenFiler released pre-build disk for VMWARE, the better solution is to download VMware pre-build OpenFiler appliance and then convert it to a format which Oracle Virtual box can import. In more details, step is like this :
1. Download openfiler vmware appliance - Link
2. Install OVFTool from VMWare and use the following command to convert appliance from vmdk to ovf...
ovftool -st=VMX -tt=OVF upload_file_with_full_path target_file_with_full_path
3. Import ovf file in Virtual box.
4. Start the new imported Virtual machine.
5. Use OpenFiler URL for connection to storage and architect/admin the storage.
