The first beta release of VirtualBox 3.1 is now available. You can download the binaries at http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/3.1.0_BETA1/

Version 3.1 will be a major update. The following major new features have been added:

In Oracle 11g Release 2 you will find that things have changed even for single instance database installation. I will try to illustrate in this series of posts how to install a single instance Oracle 11g Release 2 database to your Linux machines.

As the first part of our installation series, we will start by installing brand new Grid Infrastructure which you might think to be a fancy name for CRS+ASM but you will find out later that it is a bit more.

I'm a frequent VMware user for years. Most of my setups are done in a Virtual Machine. It's very convenient because with a new host installation, just installing VMware and restoring the virtual machines gets you up and running.

One of the names that comes around on Virtualization on Linux is VirtualBox. I did not pay any attention to it since I was quite happy with VMware. I use VMware Server, since it's free and has about every feature VMware Workstation had in the latest version I used. That was Workstation 5.5 and the only thing Server lacked was Shared Folders.