Saturday, June 25, 2011

Installing SOA 11g Cluster on Weblogic

SOA 11g cluster setup on Weblogic is a lot easier than SOA 10g clustering on OC4J for sure..Tried to document the steps sequentially, will add screenshots later.

This is a 2 Node cluster with Admin server running on 1 node and Managed server running on both nodes.

1. Download all the installables from OTN for the SOA version 11.1.1.4.
       jrockit-jdk1.6.0_24-R28.1.3-4.0.1-linux-x64.bin
       wls1034_generic.jar
       ofm_rcu_linux_11.1.1.4.0_disk1_1of1.zip
       ofm_soa_generic_11.1.1.4.0_disk1_1of2.zip
       ofm_soa_generic_11.1.1.4.0_disk1_2of2.zip

2. Run the RCU and create the schemas for the SOA Cluster. (xxx_SOAINFRA, xxx_MDS etc..)

3. Install Jrockit on both nodes.

4. Install weblogic 10.3.4 on both nodes
        java -Xms1024M -Dspace.detection=false -jar wls1034_generic.jar

5. Install SOA 11.1.1.4 on both nodes.
       a. specify oraInventory path
       b. skip software updates
       c. specify installation directory
       d. specify the DB details

6. Create the domain on Node1. Run config.sh in $ORACLE_HOME/common/bin
      a. Under "Select Optional Configuration" select 
               Managed Servers, Clusters and Machines & 
               Deployments and Services
     b. Add the 2 managed server names and their listen ports
     c. Configure cluster
     d. Add managed servers to the cluster
     e. Configure Machines (Add the 2 server names under Unix Machine tab)
     f. Assign servers to machines.
     g. Complete the domain creation....

7. Pack the SOA domain from Node1 using below command
cd $WL_HOME/common/bin
./pack.sh -managed=true -domain={path to SOA domain} -template=soadomaintemplate.jar -template_name=soa_domain_template

8. Copy the jar file to Node2 and run the unpack command there.
cd $WL_HOME/common/bin
./unpack.sh -domain={path to SOA domain} -template=soadomaintemplate.jar

9. On each host create boot properties.
cd {path to SOA domain}
vi boot.poperties
username=weblogic
passsword=welcome1
cp boot.properties servers/AdminServer/security

10. Start Admin Server on host1 and disable the host name verification for admin and managed servers. (SSL tab->Advanced). Restart the Admin Server.

11. Start Node manager on both nodes to create initial script file. Then stop the node manager, edit the $WL_HOME/common/nodemanager/nodemanager.properties to set below and restart Node managers.
StartScriptEnabled=true
            StopScriptEnabled=true

12. Now you can login to the Admin console and start the managed servers.

13. Incase you have a Load balancer, configure the same to route request to the 2 nodes. The composites being deployed on the cluster can point to the LBR URL. (make sure end point URLs in composite.xml point to this). Also set the Server URL and Server Callback URL as shown in below screenshot.



14. Coherence comes as part of the SOA suite and SOA Clusters in 11g use coherence for communicating between nodes (similar to JGroups in 10g). Without coherence setup the deployment will not get distributed across all servers.

For unicast communication mode, we need additional coherence properties to be set. These have been explained in below Oracle doc.
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E15523_01/core.1111/e12036/extend_soa.htm#CHDEAFJH

The startWeblogic.sh script on Node1 will have below properties set for Coherence to work.

EXTRA_JAVA_PROPERTIES="-Dtangosol.coherence.wka1=Node1 hostname -Dtangosol.coherence.wka2=Node2 hostname -Dtangosol.coherence.localhost=Node1 hostname"

Similarily for Node2...

That's it ! The WLS cluster should be ready to use now. 

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Nice book on Oracle Fusion Applications

Oracle Fusion Applications are the next generation ERP offering from Oracle, which packs best-of-the-breed features from Oracle Ebusiness, Peoplesoft, Siebel, JD Edwards and offers a complete standards based enterprise solution. This has been under development for few years now and is completely based on the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack (Oracle SOA Suite).

Check out the book on "Oracle Fusion Applications" in Amazon...
http://amzn.com/0071750339


An extract from the book which details the Technical Overview of Fusion Applications.
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/managing-fusion-apps-418611.pdf

Installing SAP Adapter on SOA 11gR1 PS3 (11.1.1.4)

First and foremost to clarify the naming conventions set by Oracle for SOA 11g versioning...
11g R1 PS1 - 11.1.1.2 
11g R1 PS2 - 11.1.1.3
11g R1 PS3 - 11.1.1.4

Now 11.1.1.4 version of SOA comes with a lot of bug fixes, performance enhancements (JRockit JVM instead of Sun JDK) and additional features. "Seeing is believing !" so decided to install this and check the performance gains. Now the tricky part was with the installation of SAP adapter on top of this.

Oracle documentation is again messed up with regards to installing this. Couldn't locate a direct URL from OTN to download the installer file. It seems the 11.1.1.4 version for the adapter installer isn't released yet and the SAP adapter updates for 11gR1 PS3, have been released as an OPatch. 

So incase you are looking for installing the iway adapters (SAP, Siebel, PSFT, JDE adapters) follow the below approach:

1. Install the 11g PS2 version of adapter. For this you need to apply the patch 10207507 which is nothing but copying the ApplicationAdapter.zip inside thirdparty folder and unzipping it.


2. Download the latest OPatch version i.e  p6880880_112000_Linux-x86-64


3Download the patch 11880221 from metalink to upgrade the exisiting PS2 install to PS3 version. Steps for applying this patch are as under:  
               a.  set MW_HOME 
               b.  set ORACLE_HOME
               c.  set OPatch in PATH
               d.  Apply the OPatch by running below command:
opatch apply -jre {path of Jrockit jre} -invPtrLoc $ORACLE_HOME/oraInst.loc