The following illustrates the installation of Oracle 11g Release 2 database on Windows. Installation is quite straight forward.
Before installing the database you can optionally install grid infrastructure which offers some nice feature – for instance Oracle Restart and ASM. The install guide for grid infrastructure can be found here.
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The following pictures show the grid infrastructure installation of Oracle 11g Release 2 for Windows. This is a rather short posting without much text because the pictures are quite self-explaining.
Requirements
Windows
Note there is no grid infrastructure or ASM for 32-bit Windows!
According to the documentation the following Windows versions are certified for Oracle 11g Release 2:
- Windows Server 2003 x64 with service pack 1 or higher.
- Windows Server 2003 R2 x64
- Windows Server 2008 x64 Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter, Web, and Foundation editions.
- Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter, Web, and Foundation editions
Windows Core Editions are NOT supported!
Storage
For storing your database you can use the following storage options:
- plain file system (NTFS recommended or FAT)
- ASM
- Oracle NFS for Windows
In this guide we are using ASM for storing our data files.
I just tried installing Oracle 11g Relese 2 on Windows 2008 R2 64-bit and Windows 2008. The system were installed with Windows 2008 and 2008 R2 standard edition 64-bit on a VMWARE server with 4 core with two core assigned to each virtual machine.
Until now i was unable to install it successfully. It always failed with:
[INS-20802] Grid Infrastructure Configuration failed

This is a short blog post about my findinds. Maybe someone else experience this issue as well and leaves a comment.
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I have written an guest article (direct link) for Preston de Guises fine blog on how to use networker client on opensolaris.
As of April 5th Oracle released Oracle 11g Release 2 for Windows 32-bit and 64-bit. The software can be donwloaded from OTN.
Update: I just noticed neither Clusterware (aka “RAC”) nor ASM are available for 32-bit Windows.