There are 5 different domain configurations that are available:
| Name | Description | Requirements for PC |
| dev_bpm | This domain is configured using the development template for SOA and BPM, which targets all the SOA and BPM applications to the AdminServer. | Minimum of 3 GB and 1 CPU, if running only the AdminServer with SOA and BPM Minimum of 4 GB and 2 CPUs, if running all the three servers |
| dev_bpm_spaces | This domain is configured using the development template for SOA+BPM and extended to contain UCM, Webcenter Collaboration and Webcenter Spaces. | Minimum of 6GB and 2 CPUs. |
| wc_spaces | This domain is configured with Webcenter Spaces and has BPM Process spaces installed in it. It is configured to work with the VirtualBox instance with dev_bpm domain installed. | Minimum of 5GB and 2 CPUs |
| dev_soa | This domain is configured using the development template for SOA | Minimum of 2 GB and 1 CPU, if running only the AdminServer with SOA Minimum of 4 GB and 2 CPUs, if running AdminServer, BAM as well as JDeveloper |
| dev_soa_osb | This domain is configured using the development template for SOA and Service Bus |
You can download the Pre-built Virtual Machine for SOA Suite and BPM Suite 11g from here.
You should read the excellent documentation - it is a 50 page document that describes how you install and how you can use the image. You need to download 7 2GB files to get the image, so that might take some time. I have used VirtualBox 4.1.14 for Windows, and you should have a powerful PC - I have 12GB RAM, but 8GB is probably OK for many of the domain configurations. For some images it is advised to have 2 CPUs. You will need approximately 30GB disk space. As I mentioned the documentation is excellent, so I will not repeat what is there - just add my personal notes and experiences/tips.
One thing that is important is that you need to enable hardware virtualization in your PC BIOS. You will probably need administrator rights on your PC, and you might come across many different ways on how you enable this for the different vendors.
Things take time - after the downloading and unzipping the files, the import of the appliance took 15 minutes on my PC. You should also prepare that things take time when using the VM - but the good news are that there are ways to save time - for instance you can pause the image for next time. That is useful when you can expect the starting time to be in the range of 10-20 minutes for the larger domains.
After installing the appliance and choosing domain, I wanted to adjust to my Norwegian keyboard, language and time settings - here is where you can do this if you are not on west coast USA:
System Administration >> Keyboard >> Norwegian (or your choice of keyboard..)
System Administration >> Language >> Norwegian
System Preference >> Keyboard Preferences
You will need to log out and log in before the changes are activated.
If you have trouble with USB - it is very easy to download the extension here: http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.1.14/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.1.14-77440.vbox-extpack
Here are some of the great features with this image:
- You can select to run without Graphical Desktop - and you will save 600 MB memory. You will still have a useful menu available to help you
- There are helpful menus both in the text console and in the graphical desktop
- You can disable components / servers you do not use. Ex there is a script to disable B2B: /home/oracle/bin/disable-b2binit.sh (and enable as well)
- The documentation describes well how you for instance can set up shared folders on your PC
- It contains UCM and Webcenter Spaces
- You can adjust the JVM memory settings depending on your need (in the console):
- You can set up a server for remote debugging (in the console)
- The well known users and groups are seeded in the embedded LDAP
- There is also installed an email server there (James), but it is not documented. Here are some relevant blog posts from Lucas and Martien: http://technology.amis.nl/2006/04/10/implementing-a-stand-alone-email-server-getting-started-with-apache-james/, http://blog.darwin-it.nl/2010/03/postfix-for-handling-mail-in-your.html, http://blog.darwin-it.nl/2009/09/process-e-mail-with-oracle-bpel-pm-1012.html
- The network settings in the appliance is set for the purpose of being used outside of VBOX - and that is an advantage (for example ssh on 2222, 7001 directly etc)
I have one suggestion and that is to make more easy to inspect the embedded LDAP server by changing the default credentials. I have used Jan's blog: http://jvzoggel.wordpress.com/2011/06/22/weblogic-embedded-ldap-with-an-external-ldap-client/ and changed to the default password.
dev_bpm >> Security >> Embedded LDAP
Change the (default generated) password (for example: welcome1)
You will have to restart
I was not able to use an LDAP browser from my PC on port 7001, so I installed Apache Directory Studio on the appliance:
http://directory.apache.org/studio/download/download-linux.html
Now you can look at the users and groups included.
This new image is a huge step - this will be very useful in many settings : as developer VM, as a quick enablement for a POC of as a training environment for SOA / BPM. A huge thanks to Oracle for improving this appliance, and I hope the community can give feedback so that also the next release will contain improvements.
My wish is that there will also be a domain dev_bpm_osb - I like to see OSB in all architectures, and in demonstrations and trainings it would be useful. I also believe some documentation on how the James server can be utilized will be useful. It must not be in the documentation, but the Appliance home page could for instance point to relevant blog posts or whitepapers.