Getting ready to install EBS 12.2 Vision: Quickstart notes

Getting ready for the next big thing

In the wake of last week’s announcement of the general availability of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2, I’ve started spinning up a 12.2 Vision instance, so I can start getting familiar with the product. Learning about the changes has been pretty fun so far, and you’ll be seeing more from our team (hi Maris!) soon about that. I hope to have a how-to guide for installing R12.2 Vision in the next week or two [Update: here y’go.] Before that, however, I wanted to share a few tidbits on preparing your lab environment for a 12.2 Vision install. There’s a lot of prep work required, so you might as well start now! After all, what else did you have planned for your weekend?

Caveats

It wouldn’t be a Piwowar blog post without a list of warnings. Please read, and heed. :)

1. This is a “quickstart guide,” not an instruction manual. Please make sure you get familiar with the 12.2 install guide and its associated supplementary documentation (part V39664-01 in the 12.2 Media Pack) while you’re downloading the install media and creating your test server. You will not be able to get a working Vision instance simply from reading this blog post!
2. Know your licensing situation. Software distributed through the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud (née E-delivery) is subject to a more restrictive license than OTN, even for testing purposes. Just because you can install this stuff, doesn’t mean that you should
3. Have some horsepower available. Even a Vision install of 12.2 requires a lot of resources compared to 11i and 12.0/12.1. More on that below.
4. I’m not done yet. As I work through my install, I may come back and revise this post a bit. So far, I have an unpatched 12.2.0 Vision instance going and have done basic tests of the Web, Forms, and Concurrent manager components, so starting from the info in this post, you should be able to get at least that far. :)
5. You need to know some basics to get started: How to find software on E-delivery, how to install Linux and install packages with yum, etc. If you don’t know these things, this blog post won’t be detailed enough to be useful for you. :)

Basic system requirements

Here’s what I’m using for my lab machine. It’s a single-node (apps+DB) instance, all running on my laptop in Oracle Virtualbox. It’s not built for speed, especially with a slooow 1TB 5400rpm external HDD. If you have more resources to throw at this project, go for it. I’d call the following a bare minimum:

• 2 CPU cores
• 6GB 8GB RAM. Yes, really. You could squeeze a 12.1 Vision instance into 3-4GB, but not an unmodified 12.2 Vision install. My memory footprint after I finished the install, before I started actually logging in to do any testing, was about 5GB:[plain gutter=”0″ highlight=”4″]applvis@breen MiddleTier]$ free
  total used free shared buffers cached
  Mem: 6123768 5945620 178148 0 4928 901880
  -/+ buffers/cache: 5038812 1084956
  Swap: 6291452 2434472 3856980[/plain]

  Update, 5-Oct-2013: Raised recommendation to 8GB; in subsequent testing I experienced brutal swapping during online patch runs with only 6GB of RAM available; more on that in a subsequent blog post

• 3 drives/partitions on your server: 6GB root/boot (reserve another 6GB for swap), 250GB for database and software, and 40GB for the staging area.
• Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.4, 64-bit. Grab it from E-delivery. If you choose a different version, your OS software requirements might be different than what’s described in this post.
• Two network interfaces: eth0 host-only network, eth1 NAT. This only applies for Virtualbox and/or OVM users. If you’re using VMware, you can get away with just one NAT interface. If you’re using a physical server, well…I’m jealous. ;) Whatever method you use, make sure the primary IP for the server is static, not DHCP.

Downloading the 12.2 Media

The 12.2 Media Pack has a long list of large files to download. Some of them are not needed for a Vision install. These are the ones you’ll need. Make sure to get all of the parts of the multi-part zips!

• V29764-01: Oracle Fusion Middleware Web Tier Utilities 11g Patch Set 5 (11.1.1.6.0) for Linux x86-64
• V29856-01: Oracle WebLogic Server 11gR1 (10.3.6) Generic and Coherence
• V35215-01_[123]of3: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2.0 Rapid Install StartHere
• V35230-01_[12]of2: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2.0 for Linux x86-64 Rapid Install Oracle Database 11.2.0.3.0 – Disk 1
• V35231-01_[1-5]of5: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2.0 for Linux x86-64 Rapid Install Oracle Database 11.2.0.3.0 – Disk 2
• V35802-01: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2.0 for Linux x86-64 Rapid Install AS10.1.2
• V35803-01_[123]of3: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2.0 for Linux x86-64 Rapid Install APPL_TOP – Disk 1
• V35804-01_[12]of2: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2.0 for Linux x86-64 Rapid Install APPL_TOP – Disk 2
• V35807-01 – V35813-01: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2.0 for Linux x86-64 Rapid Install Databases VISION
• V37515-01_[1-6]of6: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2.2 Update Pack for Linux x86
• V39571-01: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2.2 Documentation Library (or skip it and use the online docs; I like local copies)
• V39615-01: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 Supplemental Media
• V39664-01: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 Supplemental Documentation – REVIEW FIRST (contains copies of important install notes on My Oracle Support. Useful as a local reference, but check the live docs for updates!)

A few more things to note here:

1. I strongly recommend validating the MD5 checksums of your downloads against the digest provided on E-delivery. One bad zip file can ruin your whole installation.
2. Two of the files in the above list (V29764-01 and V29856-01) are listed as “optional” in the README for the media pack. I’m not sure why they’re listed that way, because they are definitely needed for a complete staging area and a successful install. I sacrificed several hours of my life to bring you this information; use it wisely. ;) –Update, 2 Oct 2013: Since this post was published, Oracle has confirmed that these files are required, and clarified download requirements Note 1588372.1. Issue 1 in the note covers the “non-really-optional” files, and Issue 2 warns of problems if you add unnecessary files to your staging area.
3. I’m a fan of using wget to download media from E-Delivery, because babysitting browser downloads is a colossal pain. If you’re interested, you can find the script I use (and the list of download urls) on GitHub. Extracting a cookies.txt file from your browser is left as an exercise for the reader.

Installing OS software

Read the Release 12.2 Linux x86-64 Installation and Upgrade Notes (Note 1330701.1) closely to make sure you get all of the required RPMs. Using the 11gR2 oracle pre-install RPM will not be enough. If you like shortcuts, I’ve uploaded my server’s kickstart file and a list of post-install packages to GitHub. I do not recommend trying to use the kickstart file to build your own server, but as a reference. The package list includes all the packages in the Installation note, as well as a few more I needed for VNC, and pre-reqs for the openmotif21-2.1.30 and xorg-x11-libs-compat packages. So far, I haven’t found any gaps, but if I do, I’ll update the list. If you want to use the list I’ve compiled, a simple yum install `cat packages.txt` as root will do the job.

Remember, those last two packages (openmotif21-2.1.30 and xorg-x11-libs-compat) are not available via yum; you’ll need to download and apply them separately:

[plain gutter=”0″][root@breen ~]# wget https://oss.oracle.com/projects/compat-oracle/dist/files/Enterprise_Linux/xorg-x11-libs-compat-6.8.2-1.EL.33.0.1.i386.rpm https://oss.oracle.com/projects/compat-oracle/dist/files/Enterprise_Linux/openmotif21-2.1.30-11.EL6.i686.rpm
[root@breen ~]# rpm -Uvh *.rpm
Preparing… ########################################### [100%] 1:xorg-x11-libs-compat ########################################### [ 50%] 2:openmotif21 ########################################### [100%][/plain]

Staging and installation hints

As I noted earlier, this is not an install guide, but here are a few things to keep in mind if you want to charge ahead after downloading and setting up your server:

• Setting up a staging area (buildStage.sh) is a required step for 12.2. Unlike 12.0 and 12.1 installs, you can’t just unzip everything and expect success with Rapidwiz
• If you’re in a limited-resource environment like me, consider putting your stage area on a separate physical disk from your install target.
• By default, the RMAN restore of the Vision database is configured to use 5 channels. I learned this the hard way on my first install attempt, as RMAN created 5 processes that tried to grind my poor little single spindle to paste. :) If your environment can’t handle that kind of I/O load, you can configure the RMAN recovery script to use fewer channels after creating the staging area, but before starting the rapidwiz installer:
  [plain gutter=”0″ highlight=”8″][root@breen stage]# cd Stage122/startCD/Disk1/rapidwiz/template/
  [root@breen template]# cp restore-single2.sql restore-single2.sql.orig
  [root@breen template]# vi restore-single2.sql
  [root@breen template]# cat restore-single2.sql
  –lines snipped for brevity–
  set linesize 300
  spool %s_db_oh%/appsutil/out/%s_contextname%%/%restore-single2.rman
  select ‘configure device type DISK parallelism 1;’ from dual;
  select ‘catalog start with ”INSTALL” NOPROMPT;’ from dual;
  select ‘RUN { ‘ from dual;
  select ‘set newname for datafile ‘||file#||’ to ‘||”’%s_dbhome1%/’||substr(NAME,instr(NAME,’%/%’,-1)+1,length(NAME))||”’;’ from v$datafile;
  –lines snipped for brevity–
  [root@breen template]# diff restore-single2.sql restore-single2.sql.orig
  17d16
  < select ‘configure device type DISK parallelism 1;’ from dual;[/plain]

Okay, that should be good enough to start you off with hours of downloading and staging the install media. Have fun!

Hey, look! A blog post about installing E-Business Suite, and not a single screenshot! First time for everything…