For demonstration purposes and to get up and running quickly without having to spend time installing software binaries and creating databases, you could install GoldenGate on an existing virtual machine (VM). Oracle provides a number of prebuilt virtual machines. These machines contain many of their software products that are available for download from the Oracle website at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/developer-vms-192663.html.

In order to run the VM, you will need to download and install Oracle VirtualBox that can be found at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/virtualbox/overview/index.html.

VMs can include the complete software stack from the OS to the application layer and lend themselves perfectly to development and test environments. Following a snapshot, they can be refreshed or rolled back quickly and easily to a point in time. In recent years, VMs have been supported by Oracle in production environments and are typically found in data centers that provide on-demand Platform as a Service (PaaS) from cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

VMs enable a greater density of infrastructure, providing a suite of new and existing cloud-based services that can be provisioned in minutes, thus enabling a subscription-based approach to computing. As hardware becomes less expensive with more power, it is possible to configure a single host to support multiple VMs, each having similar performance and stability as a physical machine of the same specification.