Mid-2010 x86-64 Processor Round-up

23 Jun 2010 by Simon Haslam (in General)  |  Comments (1)

Many people are upgrading from Oracle Internet Application Server (iAS/OAS) to Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g now. Middleware servers individually don't tend to be that big, so if you're on (or moving to) the x86 platform, I can see almost no reason for not buying new hardware at the same time - it's an easier and generally lower risk migration, not that expensive, will save you a hardware refresh later and may well free up some licences for deployment elsewhere. There's been dizzying progress for the last couple of years in the x86-64 world though. Frankly I've been having trouble keeping up with the new processors so had written myself a little "cheat sheet" to remind myself - I've now distilled the latest processors into this post...

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Running Fusion Middleware in Solaris Containers

28 May 2010 by Simon Haslam (in Virtualization)

A couple of months ago (yes, I know it's taken me a while to blog about it!) I worked with a customer to build a production Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g environment on Sun T5000 hardware. Given that these servers are pretty chunky I recommended that we used Solaris Containers for partitioning the various middleware tiers, and this post describes some of the considerations.

Modern web infrastructures tend to have many "moving parts." If you take a traditional Oracle Application Server cluster running java apps, for example, you would often have separate servers for OHS, OC4J, SSO, OID and then the back-end databases. Of course in a High Availability (HA) arrangement you would always have 2 or more of each of the tiers, so most customers would have 8 or so servers just for the middleware! Typically several of these machines, in particular SSO and OID ones, would be very lightly loaded. The reason for separating the tiers is primarily for security - each server has a very clear role and the network traffic can be very tightly controlled. However having so many servers makes the middleware tier a prime candidate for virtualisation, arguably far more so than the database tier. Enter Solaris Containers...

 

So, you think Solaris Containers are a good idea, but what are the configuration considerations for the Oracle middleware administrator?

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Discussions at the UKOUG App Server & Middleware SIG (11g Upgrade day)

31 Mar 2010 by Simon Haslam (in Events)

Last week we had a very lively and enjoyable UKOUG App Server & Middleware Special Interest Group meeting. For the uninitiated, these are one day events run by the UKOUG which have a mixture of presentations, discussions and networking sessions. Last week's was held at Oracle's Blythe Valley Park office, just south of Birmingham, so reasonably accessible.

The theme of the day was "Fusion Middleware 11g Upgrade" and, unusually, the vast majority of presentations were by Oracle staff. I say unusually since we aim to have a roughly 50/50 mix of Oracle and customers/partners, but with such a relatively new release I had trouble finding anyone outside of Oracle to speak*.

I won't review the presentations here (the slides are available to UKOUG members) but will mention the networking session. For this we split into groups based around a "main" technology - there were two Forms/Reports groups, one for Identity Management and one for Java applications & SOA. I posed three questions for consideration within the groups, then we had an open discussion session:

• What are your main reasons to upgrade to 11g?
• What is putting you off upgrading?
  
• What could Oracle do to help?

Martin Morris & Russ Hodgson from Oracle Support kindly operated the flipchart and keyboard to collate the opinions, which I have summarised here...

Updated 15 April 2010 after Oracle has moved back end of iAS 10.1.2 support by a year

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Interview with Mike Lehmann from Oracle at UKOUG TEBS 2009

05 Jan 2010 by Simon Haslam (in General)

At the UKOUG TEBS conference in Birmingham last month we were very fortunate that Oracle sent over Mike Lehmann from Canada to present. Mike is very senior figure - you'll see him talking about application server and related technologies (often whilst doing demos) supporting Thomas Kurian at the big events. Given that 2009 was such a significant year for Fusion Middleware I thought it would be good to interview Mike to ask about upgrades to OFM 11g and what he can see in his "application server crystal ball". Having never recorded a podcast before it was quite a learning experience!

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Retrospective: Oracle Application Server 4.0

31 Dec 2009 by Simon Haslam (in Install & Upgrade)  |  Comments (1)

Yes, you read the title correctly - for a little "end of of the noughties" light relief, this article is about Oracle Application Server 4.0, released a decade ago at the end of 1999.

 

Whilst my first encounters with Oracle middleware were Oracle Web Application Server 3.0 (WAS) in about 1998, it wasn't until the end of 2000 that I got my hands on a production installation. This was a dot-com startup company who had a Oracle Application Server 4.0 (OAS) cluster, backed by a two node OPS database, and all running on Sun Enterprise hardware. Therefore I have a special fondness for OAS as it has set the stage for my work over the best part of 10 years.

Oracle's early middleware server products were:

• Web Application Server 3.0 - released in 1997.
• Oracle Application Server 4.0 - released at the end of 1999.
• Oracle 9iAS Release 1 (9.0.1) - released in 2001. This now uses Apache as the web listener and OC4J as the Java server (following the acquisition of the Orion product).
  
• Oracle 9iAS Release 2 (9.0.2) - released summer 2002. This was a very big release as it was the first version to include an infrastructure tier (along with a accompanying patch CD from Day 1). The release notes ran to 42(!) pages and it's fair to say it was difficult to install...

I don't know what came before WAS 3 - WAS 2 presumably... Around this time were also the first versions of WebDB, which subsequently morphed into Oracle Portal, though Application Express went full circle by reverting to the simpler WebDB-style architecture. Anyway, 9iAS R2 became the foundation of the product set right up to the significant re-engineering effort that went into Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g as released in July 2009.

Installation

Whilst I don't use this blog for detailed 'click this, click that' articles (I hope that most of my readers can read the manuals), but for a bit of fun I thought I'd reinstall OAS 4.0. Blogs hadn't reached critical mass in 1999 so there's a good chance this may be the only post you'll find on the topic!

So, out of Veriton's extensive CDROM library (a filing cabinet, with rather more emphasis on 'cabinet' than 'filing'!), I found Oracle Application Server v4.0.8.1.0 for Sun SPARC Solaris2.x. This comes one one disk which includes all the options ('cartridges' in OAS parlance) and documentation.

Disk Trivia: The WAS disks had a colour image on them but some time before OAS was released this was replaced by the black jumble of Oracle letters which has been used for all subsequent Oracle media packs as far as I'm aware. The photo on the right shows the WAS 3.0, OAS 4.0 Beta and OAS 4.0 disks - the eagle-eyed might even spot that on the WAS 3.0 disk I crossed out Windows NT and marked it as Solaris (the two were labelled incorrectly from the factory).

So, first things first - where's the installation guide?

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