Oracle eBusiness Suite R12 Demo on a Laptop

One of my readers asked whether it would be possible to setup a Release 12 Vision Demo environment on laptop. Possible? Absolutely. Disk and memory hungry beast? Of course! Support for 1,000 concurrent users. Maybe not!

I've done this previously with R11i a couple of ways and I'm planning to do it with R12. You can install Linux on the laptop, or use a Virtual Machine - These days I'd go down the Virtual Machine route for demo systems for a number of reasons:

• You need a client tier so the host is the client
• You don't need a high performance solution, you're running on a laptop after all!
• Ease of backup/duplicate
• Ease of "suspend" of the server
• Possibility of creating the environment on a grunty machine and move to laptop
• If things go haywire you don't have to rebuild your laptop
• If Oracle was kind enough to provide an eBusiness Suite R12 Vision Demo Virtual Appliance you'd have bugger all to do to get this running!

My choice for the Oracle Applications/eBusiness Suite is always to run under Linux/Unix as opposed to Windows as the 3rd Party Software requirements are a real pain for the Windows option, both in terms of licensing and install/configuration.

Anyway I digress, I'd get this up and running as follows, assuming you have all required licensing in place.

1. Make sure you have a recent laptop with 2Gb RAM or more, running say Windows XP SP2
2. Source an external USB2.0, Firewire or eSATA 250Gb + drive, whichever is compatible with the laptop. Note R12 Vision Demo is apparently 175Gb, plus you'll need space for O/S and patches and all your other toys.
3. Source and install VMWare Server on your laptop
4. Source and install Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 32bit (or Red Hat 4.0, Suse 9 or Whitebox 4.0) under VMWare and apply updates - check Metalink Certify for supported O/S
5. Source the latest Oracle Applications R12 32bit Release - its like 41Gb (13 DVDs) so would take a while to download - better to get the box!
6. Install R12 choosing the Vision Demo environment onto your Linux Server under VMWare
7. Download and apply the latest R12 update pack - check out Steven Chan's blog for things to watch. Also you should check the R12 recommended patches on this page on Metalink
8. If you want to setup outbound email you'll need an SMTP Mail server and to configure the Workflow Java Mailer, but best to keep email within the laptop, so just setup Sendmail and Dovecot ... I feel another post is due on that.

Sweet, all sorted.

Some other pointers:

• User Manuals etc. for R12 are publicly available at http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B40089_05/current/html/docset.html
• Technical Reference Manuals (includes ER diagrams, table details etc) are at https://etrm.oracle.com/pls/etrmlatest/etrm_search.search but you need a Metalink account (ie pay for Support) for access to that.

PS. Another question that came out of this was:

Can I run Oracle eBusiness Suite on Linux on an AMD Athlon 64bit CPU?

Absolutely, for Release 11i and prior you can run the 32bit version of the O/S on 64bit hardware and put the eBusiness Suite on that. From Release 12 you can run 64bit, see Metalink Note 416305.1. When you source your software be sure to match the O/S and eBusiness Suite media, ie. 32bit O/S + 32bit eBiz, or 64bit O/S and 64bit eBiz.

I'd be keen to hear any pointers from anyone running R12 Vision Demo on a Laptop under VMWare!