I have for a few years created a play environment in a similar way. Getting a database installed in a VM is not too hard. But I found that I did it fairly often and not always in the same way and not always without having to resolve problems I know I had solved before…

At the start of the Christmas break I decided to get started with Oracle VirtualBox 4.0. To get up and going faster with an 11g database I opted to download the pre-made image (called appliance by Oracle) that they use during Developer Days. It has a lot of things pre installed and ready to go. Oracle Enterprise Linux 5…