11g on VMWare

Question

I understand that Oracle server is not supported on VMWare but this is just a test install and I am facing two major issues which I never faced in 10g under same environment. I have installed 11g RAC on a two node SLES 10 sp1 virtual machine. I am faced with two issues:
a) After reboot, the CRS doesn't start. It does not even start if I issue init.crs start command. After lot of experimentation, I found that after issuing init.crs start, the CRS cannot find the voting disk. However, if I rerun the root.sh script, the CRS starts up immediately. By itself the root.sh doesn't startup the CRS. I have to run it after running init.crs start. What does root.sh do to make CRS recognize the voting disk? Why init.crs cannot do the same? The disk permissions etc. are correct.
b) The virtual machines do not stay up for more than 30-45 minutes. They crash without any entry in CRS logs about node eviction. Is there a way to relax the timings so that even with missed heartbeats, the CRS would wait longer before evicting a node?
If someone has any insight, I would greatly appreciate. I had earlier tested the same setup with 10g RAC and did not face these issues.
Thanks

Answer 1

Both VMs are on same host. The host is XP Pro. The NICs in VM are whatever VMWare installs. There is no way to make it GB NIC. The physical NIC on host server is actually a wireless card and all setups have worked fine with this. I will try changing it to the wired ethernet adapter which is GB.
The clusterware by itself is stable. Even ASM is stable. The DB server software only install also works stable. Once I create the database, then the VMs start crashing. This is why I think it is a timeout issue. I have tried relaxing the limits on disk ping timeout but it doesn't seem to help. I cannot find anything in the CRS logs if there is a node eviction. I need to look more. Maybe there is something in syslog.
The reason I find RAC harder on Linux is that you have to setup user equivalence, kernel limits, required OS libraries, xhost, raw devices, raw device permissions. In Windows, once Oracle user account is setup with local administrator permissions on both nodes, all these things are set automatically. There is no need to check for so many libraries. Everything is installed by default by OS.
Changing network settings in Linux is another challenge. In Windows, renaming a network interface name is easy as right click, rename. In SUSE Linux, I had to go through hoops to rename the adapter from eth3 to eth0. With kernel 2.6, udev has made things more complicated.
In Linux, all configuration settings for every installed program and OS itself are scattered across hundreds of text files all over the place. Most of these files are ill documented. Then there are so many distros of Linux, making it very difficult to remember where these files are in each distro.
Initially I also used to think that RAC/Oracle were easier to install on Linux. However, ever since I started with Windows, I find that things are far easier. Anyways, it is more of personal preference.