Geeky Project Part 9: Create a WebCenter VM

So, I’m in the home stretch installing WebCenter.

Here’s the installation guide, if you’re following along at home. Yesterday, I got through the “Preparing to Install” steps, which consist mostly of running RCU to create the WebCenter schemas.

I’m skipping the installation of JDeveloper for the time being. If I were using the VM in the future, I’d probably connect to it from the host, OS X, rather than run it all on the VM.

Next, I completed the steps in “Installing on DHCP Hosts”, which certainly isn’t ideal, but at this point, I’ll finish up first and go back to assign a static IP if needed. I’m sure there will be plenty of Googling involved with that, i.e. assigning a static IP to a VM which is using NAT.

Sounds like a fun project.

Skimming over the next few sections, which don’t apply, I’m ready to run the installer and get this party started.

The installer asks for the path to the JDK each time you run it. Maybe it’s just me, but getting that path just so is a doozy for me.  I struggled with this step mightily.

Anyway, welcome back to the WebCenter 11g installer.

This time, I’m fully prepared.

Guess I didn’t capture my first (erm, second) try. Anyway, the “Checking recommended operating system packages” step failed, along with “Checking physical memory”.

Digging through the report, I found that I was missing a single package, compat-db-4.1.25-9.

No worries, I’ll bet it’s on one of the OEL .iso files. So, back to mounting them. Sure enough, there’s a more recent version of compat-db on Disk 3. So, I ran rpm -ivh for it and went back to the installer.

At this point, I also decided to bump the VM memory to 1 GB, just to see how it performed. My host OS only has 2 GB total, so I closed down all the applications running to conserve resources.

Back in the installer, I passed the recommended OS packages step, but the physical memory still failed. Bit of a quibble really. I set the memory to 1,024 MB, but the installer only reported 1,008 MB. Oh well, close enough.

Onward.

I accepted the defaults for the most part. You might want to do something different.

Yeah, I know the default port for http is 80 and therefore, I don’t need to specify. It was late, and I just don’t care. At this point, I’m assuming that WebLogic has a web server in there. I don’t recall seeing anything that said that explicitly, though. Anyway . . .

Nice, the pieces are fitting together now. This information comes from DBCA and RCU. Now I’m cruising.

Finally, the installation summary, and now to install . . .

W00t! I made it. For the eagle-eyed out there, you’ll notice this installer has an “elapsed time” counter in the bottom right corner, a nice feature.

You’ll also notice that the installation summary says “11m 9s” and the 100% complete progress says “8m 34s”. This is because during the installation, Time Machine kicked on to do a backup, and my whole machine went unresponsive, guest and host.

So, I had to force quit the VM, lower the RAM back to 512 MB and start over from the beginning.

As a funny aside, I have heard that allocating more memory to a VM does not always make it faster and can make it slower in some cases. Weird little factoid.

We’re not done quite yet. I want to install UCM (formerly Stellent) to use the WebCenter Documents service. You can skip this step if you don’t want to use UCM or want to configure it later.

OK, I’m stumped. Where is the UCM install media? I combed through the WebCenter install disks and found nothing about UCM.

Back to Google. I found this explanation on OTN. Scroll down a bit, and you’ll find a reply stating that UCM needs to be downloaded separately.

You can find it here under Required Additional Software. So, download, unzip, and I’m back in action. FYI, the path you want here is “/ContentServer/install/UCM/ContentServer” under the directory where you unzipped UCM.

Notice the jump from 8m to 34s to 51m 40s? Even with a fast connection, it takes a while to download 1.7 GB and unzip it.

Step 9 in the wizard was the UCM install progress. I didn’t get capture of that, but here’s the final-final completion step.

Wow, elapsed time was 87m 44s. It would definitely have been a lot faster on a real server machine with beefier hardware.

That’s it. I finally installed WebCenter, but we’re not quite done yet.

I found this helpful post, which incidentally, details an install on XE, something Jordan suggested. Good to know.

In his post, George installs both WebLogic and Oracle Web Tier, which has me a bit perplexed. The WebCenter installation guide doesn’t mention Web Tier, but I also didn’t see any mention of web server setup in WebLogic.

Anyone know?

So, looks like one more post to get all the post-installation and configuration tasks finished. By the end of that post, I promise I’ll have a complete VM.

I’m also planning to do a short version that details all the downloads, steps and gotchas of this process–a Cliff’s Notes version, if you will.

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