Tuesday, August 14, 2007

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:

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!

15 comments:

Gareth said...

Update: Fixed reference that implied R12 can't run under 64bit - it now can, good stuff.

jaleel said...

Thanks for the information Gareth! Your posts are really helpful! Please keep it up!

Steven said...

Terrific article, Gareth. This is really useful material.

Regards,
Steven Chan, Oracle

Gareth Roberts said...

Update: Added links to download software and patches.
Thanks for the kind comments!

NT said...

can i install e-business suite r12 on a windows server 2003 x64 machine?

will it run in 64bit mode or 32bit mode?

Gareth Roberts said...

Hi phs,
Should be able to install. 64bit is down to software. I haven't tried it, or looked at Certify, but I have a feeling you'd be better sticking with 32bit software for Windows.

Generally, you must match your O/S bit with Oracle eBiz bit ... I.e. If you have 32 bit O/S software you need the 32 bit Oracle Applications software. If you have a 64bit O/S you should get 64bit Oracle Apps media... Note that 64bit Apps software is only available from Release 12, 11i was only 32bit... Also note 64 bit hardware understands 32 bit software, but generally not the other way around?

appltop said...

Is there a place where I could download a complete R12 installation as VMWare virtual machine ? (would save some time doing the install from scratch)

cheers, Enno

Gareth said...

Hi appltop,
Not that I'm aware of, although Oracle have started releasing appliances or templates or vm images for Oracle VM but not EBS just Siebel in the Applications space so far. Check out http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/vm/templates.html

I have heard that there are a couple of companies that may provide the same.

If I hear more info I'll post it here.

Gareth

Julio Yanarico said...

Hi Gareth
I have one laptop and the hard disk is not sufficient, is possible to install the e business suite in a external hard disk

Thanks

Gareth said...

Hi Julio,

You can install onto External hard disk, make sure its USB2.0 or connection of that sort of speed. I'd go for VM option, and install it on a desktop or server where speed is fast and disk is local, then transfer the VM to the external hard disk - I've done this option myself on a couple of occasions.

There are a number of threads on EBS / laptop on forums.oracle.com.

Regards,
Gareth

Vee said...

Is Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.1 Media Pack for Microsoft Windows (+64-bit+) available please?

I couldn't find it on edelivery

Reg
Vee

appltop said...

Actually I installed R12.1 on a MAC book Pro:
Konfiguration 8GB RAM, 500 GB disk
(280 GB for the Linux partition)
Vmware+Oracle "unbreakable" Linux (32 bit)
no major problems so far.

Works surprisingly stable, It's even possible to access the Vision instance from another Windows VM machine on the same box. (just in case you want to use TOAD).

Kalyana Chakravarthy said...

Hi Gareth,
My laptop has come with Windows Vista Home Premium.
Is it possible to install vmware in this environment.

Thanks in advance!!!
Regards
Kalyana Chakravarthy

Gareth said...

Hi Kalyana,
I've heard of people running linux on vmware on vista, but not sure its certified or error free. Also not sure if home version is enough - give it a go!
Regards,
Gareth

Trevor said...

Seems Oracle finally got round to putting EBS 12.1.1 on a virtual appliance along with vision demo - i was searching for VMs and came across your article so thought i'd post the link.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/vm/ebs-093153.html