Oracle Fusion Middleware

Oracle Business Integration 11.1.1.7.0 VirtualBox Appliance
Oracle SOA Suite with Oracle Service Bus
Oracle BPM Suite with Process Spaces
Oracle Event Processing

1 Using the virtual appliance

1.1 Install the appliance

•  Ensure system requirements are met i.e. 64-bit machine with 8 GB RAM and 50 GB free disk space. Enable hardware virtualization in your PC BIOS (required).

•  Download and install the latest Oracle VM VirtualBox.

•  Download all parts of the archive i.e. files with names ending in .001, .002 etc.

•  Download the .md5 checksum file, which contains the MD5 checksums of all the parts to test the integrity of the downloaded files. Use utilities such as md5sum on Linux, or any compatible Windows utility, for example http://www.etree.org/md5com.html / Cygwin.

•  Unzip the archive using latest WinZip or 7Zip. This should create a single file, ending in .ova – this is the virtual appliance that is ready for import.

•  Start VirtualBox and set the import folder for the image. Go to File-->Preferences

• Set the Default Machine Folder to a location of your choice with enough free disk space. This is where VirtualBox will store the virtual image you are about to import. Click OK

• Import the appliance (File-->Import Appliance …) and choose the .ova file saved earlier. You can change the name of the virtual machine if you wish.

• Click Import. Read the license agreement and accept by clicking Agree. The import will take a few minutes.

1.2 Configure the virtual machine

Change memory settings

• With the appliance selected, click on Settings and then go to System.

• Set the memory to the desired value depending on the intended use of the appliance. The seeded value is 5 GB. Note: You will get a “non-optimal settings” warning if you exceed the memory threshold for your host machine. You may ignore these warnings as long as you leave enough memory for the host OS e.g. minimum 1.5 GB for Windows. Also ensure no programs are running in the background e.g. email clients. Here are some typical usage configurations and related memory needs.

                                 o Server Only: WLS servers running in console mode with no graphical desktop. Run Firefox/Enterprise Manager and JDeveloper on a different physical machine and connect to the virtual machine over the network.

                                  o Desktop: Graphical desktop is started, with Firefox/Enterprise Manager and JDeveloper running within the VM. Useful for smaller, simpler demos.

VM Memory (MB)	Recommended for…	Servers that can be started…
5120	Server Only	DB + AdminServer
6144	Server Only	DB + AdminServer + UCM (or BAM, any one server)
6656 (8 GB m/c)	Desktop	DB + AdminServer + IDE + browser apps e.g. EM, Worklist
10240 (12 GB m/c)	Server Only	DB + AdminServer + all managed servers

Change the number of CPUs

• Go to the “Processor” tab and enter the desired value. Leave it at the maximum value (recommended for laptops), or reduce it to limit the number of CPUs available to the virtual machine (e.g. use only 2 cores of a quad-core or larger machine).

Handling errors related to USB 2.0

• If you see an error related to USB 2.0, either install the Oracle VM Virtual Box extension (available in the same location as the image), or disable USB 2.0:

• Go to USB

• Uncheck the box in front of “Enable USB 2.0 (EHCI) Controller” and click OK.

Configure network settings on local machine

When running the appliance in “Server Only” mode, you will need to run JDeveloper, Enterprise Manager and browser applications on your local host machine, connecting to the virtual machine over the network. This requires network setting changes on your local host machine.

• Edit your local machine’s hosts file and add soabpm-vm and soabpm-vm.site as aliases for your loopback address as shown below. The hosts file can be found in /etc/hosts (Linux) and %WIN%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (Windows)

            127.0.0.1 soabpm-vm soabpm-vm.site (or)

            192.168.xx.xx soabpm-vm soabpm-vm.site

Note: Using a loopback address will only work for NAT network mode (see below). If you change the VirtualBox network mode to Bridged, then run “ifconfig” within the VM to note the IP address assigned to the virtual machine eth0 interface, and use that instead of 127.0.0.1.

• If you are unable to connect to soabpm-vm from your local machine to the VM, change Network Proxy settings on your local machine to ensure that there are no conflicts with other machines on the network. For example, there may be another VM instance named soabpm-vm running on the corporate network, whose IP address is being used by the browser instead of your local machine loopback address. To avoid this, either turn off any Network Proxy, or ensure that soabpm-vm, soabpm-vm.site, localhost and 127.0.0.1 are bypassed from the proxy. This will force the IP address resolution to happen from your local machine hosts file instead of the corporate DNS.

Configure network adapter settings for the VM

 

• The default network adapter configuration is set to NAT mode. If you wish to have the VM directly exposed to the external network for server-to-server communication with an external machine, you can change the network adapter to Bridged mode. This is only recommended for certain complex configurations such as running multiple virtual machines. For more details on this mode, refer to the VirtualBox documentation. 

1.3 Start the appliance

• With the appliance selected, click on Start

• If this window pops up, check “Do not show this message again” and click OK

TIP: Use Right-Ctrl to “unlock” the mouse and switch between the VBox and local system.

•  Login as oracle with password as oracle (see Appendix for list of seeded credentials). After logging in, you will see a menu with various options.

• The VBox appliance is started in console/text mode by default to save memory. To start the desktop, choose “Start Graphical Desktop” and press return, which will start the Gnome desktop. This is only required to be done once to change seeded JVM settings for the WLS servers (see the next section).

• In order to return to text/console mode, log out of the graphical display. Go to System --> Log Out oracle ….

1.4 Stop the appliance

When you want to stop the appliance you have two options: shutting down the machine; or saving the machine state. Saving the machine state - similar to Windows “Hibernate” - is faster and can be useful for demos as you can leave everything running (servers, IDE, browsers etc).

Shutting down the image

•  If you want to shut down the VBox completely from text/console mode, first stop the WLS servers (see next section). Check the server status to ensure all servers are down.

• Choose Shutdown the VM and hit return

Saving the machine state

•  Click on the X (close) at the top right of your VirtualBox window or right-click on the VM icon in the Windows taskbar. Select Close and the Close Virtual Machine dialog appears. 

• Choose “Save the machine state” and Click OK

• The Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager shows the image as “Saved”. To restart the image, click on Start as you would also do after a shutdown, and it will restore to the same state, including all servers, IDE, browsers etc.

2 Managing the WLS Servers

2.1 Change seeded JVM settings for WLS servers

Servers in the domain are configured with their own heap settings. To change these settings, you need to login to the graphical desktop.

• Start the VM Control Center, which is the Manage WebLogic Servers desktop icon.

• To change the heap size settings, go to JVM Settings

• Set heap size and Click Apply, then OK. For better performance, log off from the desktop as this releases a chunk of memory.

NOTE: If you start the servers using the WLS scripts, bypassing the control center command-line or GUI utilities, these memory settings will not be used.

2.2 Manage WLS servers in graphical desktop mode

• To start the WLS servers, double-click on the “Manage Weblogic Servers” icon on the desktop if the VM Control Center is not already open. This will open the VM Control Center – the same interface used to set the JVM settings.

•  In the Server Control tab, you can start all configured servers or a subset of servers. It is not recommended to start all the managed servers unless you have the physical memory and the VM memory settings have been configured correctly.

• Choose the server(s) you want to start and click Start. Check status messages on the right hand panel. The server is up when you see “Admin Server …. is now running”. It takes between 4 to 7 minutes to start AdminServer. You can now close the window.

• To check the status of the servers, click Server Status in the VM Control Center.

• To stop the servers, choose your server in the VM Control Center and click Stop. Confirm you want to stop the server(s) by clicking Yes. The SOA server is stopped when you see the message “Admin Server … has been shutdown”.

2.3 Manage WLS servers in console mode

When starting the server in text mode, you will still make use of the changed memory settings (heap space) you set earlier.

• To switch to console (text) mode from graphical desktop mode, log out first using System--> Log Out oracle…

•  “Start WLS Servers” is already selected (if not, select it) and hit return.

•  Select the server(s) and hit return again. 

• The server(s) are/is started when you see “Press any key to continue ….”

•  To see the status of the server, choose Check Server Status
•  To stop the server, choose Stop WLS Servers, choose the server(s) and click return. You will see “Done” when the server is stopped.

If you want to shut down the VBox completely from text/console mode, first stop the servers (check the status to ensure) and then use the option “Shutdown the VM”.

2.4 Manage WLS servers using command line scripts

Once in console/text mode, you can start a shell window and manage the WLS servers. To return back to the text menu, run vmenu from the command prompt.
Command line scripts are available in /home/oracle/bin directory to manage the WLS servers. These are start-wls-server.sh, stop-wls-server.sh, check-server-status.sh

NOTE: If you start the servers using the WLS scripts, bypassing the VM Control Center GUI or the VM command-line scripts, these memory settings will not be used.

3 Using Desktop Applications

You can choose between running JDeveloper and Enterprise Manager on your local machine or within the image. To decide on the configuration, refer to the VM memory-typical usage configuration table in the previous section. To use the local machine JDeveloper and Enterprise Manager, ensure that the network configuration is setup as explained in the previous section.

3.1 Start JDeveloper

•  To start JDeveloper on the VM image, start it by double-clicking on the JDeveloper desktop shortcut icon on the left side of the desktop.

3.2 Start Enterprise Manager (Fusion Middleware Control, short EM)

• The AdminServer must be Running before you can use EM. Open a browser window and enter URL http://soabpm-vm:7001/em .

•  Login into Application with user credentials. EM periodically times out due to inactivity. Simply login again when prompted.

3.3 Set up servers for remote debugging

The VM Control Center allows you to run any of the servers in the configured domain in debug mode, ideal for running a step-through debug session in your JDeveloper. To enable:

• Start the VM Control Center by clicking on the Manage Weblogic Servers and click on the Remote Debugging tab

• Select Enable for the server you would like to run in remote debugging mode

•  Optionally, you can change the port. If you change the port number, and you will be connecting to the server from outside the virtual machine, you will need to add a new port-forwarding entry in the virtual machine (Devices-->Network Adapters-->Port Forwarding). The default port 4000 is already set up for port-forwarding. If you will be running more than one server in this mode, make sure you use different port numbers, and configuring the VM NAT port forwarding for those ports.

•  Restart the server that you enabled for remote debugging. The server will wait for you to start your debug session in JDeveloper and connect to the server. Until you do that, the server will not start up.

Hope it helps...!!!!

Thanks & Regards,
Madhusudan Reddy K