ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not Supported on This System

ORA-00845:

MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system

Cause: The MEMORY_TARGET parameter was not supported on this operating system or /dev/shm was not sized correctly on Linux.

Action: Refer to documentation for a list of supported operating systems. Or, size /dev/shm to be at least the SGA_MAX_SIZE on each Oracle instance running on the system.

Solution:

I'm using an Oracle Linux 6.4 64 bit with 4GB RAM on VirtualBox, and change Oracle's memory configuration

alter system set MEMORY_MAX_TARGET = 2048M scope=spfile;

Apparently, there's no enough memory for Oracle to startup. As by default, Oracle Linux uses 50% of total RAM as /dev/shm.

df -h | grep shm

tmpfs 2.0G 284K 2.0G 1% /dev/shm

Increasing RAM size and bounce Linux should solve the issue

df -h | grep shm

tmpfs 3.0G 112K 3.0G 1% /dev/shm

[oracle@odilab ~]$ sqlplus "/as sysdba"

SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.1.0 Production on Sun Nov 24 00:29:47 2013

Copyright (c) 1982, 2009, Oracle. All rights reserved.

Connected to an idle instance.

SQL< startup

ORACLE instance started.

Total System Global Area 2137886720 bytes

Fixed Size 2215064 bytes

Variable Size 1610613608 bytes

Database Buffers 520093696 bytes

Redo Buffers 4964352 bytes

Database mounted.

Database opened.