O-box at Oracle OpenWorld 2014 by Simon Haslam

At this year’s Oracle OpenWorld conference I presented during two sessions. Firstly, I co-presented “Oracle WebLogic on Oracle Database Appliance: Combining High Availability and Simplicity [CON8004]” with Frances Zhao-Perez from Oracle. I have been presenting with Frances for several years now – originally about GridLink for RAC, then Application Continuity and most recently WebLogic on ODA – and always thoroughly enjoy it (though we both invariably run out of time!).

For this session Frances discussed the WebLogic on ODA implementation, what’s new in the 12.1.3 release, and the up-coming Enterprise Manager 12c plug-in for ODA. I then described what you needed to do to install SOA (and so other ‘upper stack’ Fusion Middleware products) on the ODA.

Frances & Simon presenting. Oracle teddy bears & other goodies were given away in raffle!
Photo credit: O-Tech Magazine

In summary, if you’re looking to install SOA on ODA using the WebLogic on ODA implementation, you need to tackle:

• Disk space, in particular the middleware home which only comes with 3GB and you’ll need at least 5GB for SOA (fortunately ODA 12.1.2 now has an API to add extra disk space so you no longer need the trickery we had to do for O-box)
• Packages: you need to install another 17-43 RPMs (depending on version)
• Tuning to suit SOA WebLogic instances (the default managed server heap is 3GB but you’ll probably want to increase that)
• Installing Fusion Middleware Infrastructure for SOA 12c
• Port management as the VMs have firewalls enabled out of the box
• Domain design and how to add extra SOA environments (i.e. domains) later
• Licensing and setting up CPU pools
• Status of VMs and their lifecycle management (currently only possible via CLI)
• SSL certificates as by default WebLogic on ODA uses Demo Certificates which aren’t suitable for production use
• Automating patches and updates, e.g. for the JDK quarterly security updates

These are most of the areas we have been working on since the O-box proof of concept back in May 2013. We hope that if you’re looking for SOA on ODA you’ll consider the O-box SOA Appliance, but otherwise tackling these steps should help you to provision a SOA platform for yourself.

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