Part 1. Installing SOA Suite on Eucalyptus - Intro

Introduction
This is the first part in blog series on installation of Oracle SOA Suite for eucalyptus private cloud. The main segments are:

• Installing SOA Suite on a pristine premade Linux image 
• Create new image based on own installation so that others can easily set up their own test environments 
• Using the newly created image for new instances

This blog posts records all the steps that I went through to get Oracle SOA Suite 11g installed on a on-premises cloud environment. The method could be called “brute force” rather than textbook as there are a number of issues that I was still learning and took a few wrong paths, but managed to get everything set up finally. You may encounter similar issues as in your environment issues like proxy addresses may not be self-evident etc.

What is eucalyptus
Eucalyptus is a on-premises cloud implementation that has compatibility with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API. This allows ideally to move work between private and public clouds and use the applications that use the AWS API.

A little bit more on the tooling side is here:
http://www.eucalyptus.com/eucalyptus-cloud/tools

Clouds itself are all about data center automation. Making it child’s play to request needed number of virtual servers, install required software there and start testing or production of whatever I need. Clouds have a number of well-known benefits:
Business agility via getting feedback fast and cheaply. The cost (time and resources) of experimentation is a large inhibitor of innovation and new revenue streams generation. With cloud technology and (similarly) agile processes

• businesses can free up their work force to tasks that drive the business. In practice, thanks to these items:  
• zero (public cloud) or small shared (on-premise private) CAPEX (versus heavy CAPEX on non-shared legacy architectures) eases investment barriers to approve new projects
• With legacy delivery you may bump it a somewhat conflicting sounding problem: success disaster - when a service becomes more popular faster than expected. In many cases the legacy systems’ capacity expansion processes and procurement (it may take months to order and get delivered anything) cannot meet the growth demand which leads to success disaster  
• Operational efficiencies – on cloud you do management and allocation with same tool for everything and on silo architectures you have different tools per product. Heavy automation in cloud datacenters and services is a part of this as well versus often partly manual and error-prone steps in legacy.

Eucalyptus provides the management part of this automation. Beneath it requires a virtualization layer such as kvm, XEN or VMWare ESX. Eucalyptus provides the management API and a set of tools.

More on the eucalyptus platform itself at:

http://www.eucalyptus.com/

My Use
I intend to use the environment for running internal training courses or to give people an image that they can start their own environments for further development and training.

My environment
I am running my company’s windows installation that I have virtualized and run inside my Mac. What I want to set up is a SOA Suite installation on eucalyptus so that I can run jDeveloper and Eclipse (Eclipse is needed for oracle service bus and complex event processing engine) on my virtual windows and deploy to the cloud. This would speed up as I do not need to start the soa suite anymore on the windows image as well I could reduce the memory settings for the virtual image.

Overview
The main steps in installing Oracle SOA Suite on eucalyptus are:

• Get eucalyptus account and configure all tools you’ll be using like hybridfox, xming, putty unless you already have them
• Select an instance of Linux and start it
• Patch the linux OS so that it has all the libraries and tools needed for installation (e.g. with oracle-verified rpm or manually)
• Create additional volumes and mount them for the SW unless your image has enough space
• Install oracle DB
• Run repository creation utility (created needed users and tables for soa suite)
• Install weblogic apps server
• Install soa suite
• Create own instace out of the just installed environment