For those who want to become familiar with Oracle RAC 11g without a major cash outlay, this guide provides a low-cost alternative to configuring an Oracle RAC 11g Release 2 system using commercial off-the-shelf components and downloadable software at an estimated cost of US$2,200 to US$2,700. The system will consist of a two node cluster, both running Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) Release 5 Update 4 for x86_64, Oracle RAC 11g Release 2 for Linux x86_64, and ASMLib 2.0. All shared disk storage for Oracle RAC will be based on iSCSI using Openfiler release 2.3 x86_64 running on a third node (known in this article as the Network Storage Server).