I have just three words to describe the experience: Counter-intuitive, Convoluted and ATROCIOUS.
Yes. Atrocious.
Getting a working Peoplesoft setup using the OVM templates is about as easy as pulling teeth. After having installed the OVM, the OVM-MANAGER, Converting the template zips to an accessible format, Importing the templates, Creating Virtual Machines, Starting Virtual Machines, Going through the initial config, and NOT GETTING A WORKING SETUP, I have decided to finally give up on this being in any way "a sane approach" to getting a demo environment going quickly.
It took me a good week of farting around with Virtual Box (what I installed OVM on top off), OVM, OVM Manager and I'm still no further off than if I had just downloaded the edelivery zip files myself.
I don't know what exactly Oracle is trying to accomplish here by making things so ridiculously difficult by forcing prospective customers to use OVM... I think as far as pushing "Oracle VM" as a "virtualization solution" is concerned the writing is on the wall. Oracle better recognize that VMWare won that race long time ago. Please stop struggling with it, it will be easier for all of us ;)
I have now decided to just do a full install of 8.52 , something which I should have done to begin with. However, I was seduced by the thought of (1) not having to install 40 GB of install media, and (2) being able to get a running PSOFT environment once I got past the OVM Server/Manager installation part. Suffice it to say that OVM Server & Manager part is the easy piece...
So the plan now is to download UGGH!!! the 8.52 media kit, and just do a straight VBox->OEL5 install for the WEB/APP/DB tiers. I might even try running all tiers on one OEL virtualbox instance and use an XP or Win7 Guest as the "developer Workstation"
This is something that Oracle can very easily do since they now own VirtualBox however they choose to make things needlessly over-complicated and end up making the end product pretty much useless for 99% of their customer base.
My suggestions to Oracle:
1. Supply VmWare images or templates.
2. Supply VirtualBox importable templates.
3. PLEASE. PLEASE. KILL Oracle VM. It is done like dinner. VMWare won that war, the sooner you recognize, the better off we'll all be in the long run.
kthxbye! :)
5 comments:
Couldn't agree more with you! Going through your pain right now. ;-)
Did you get it installed in VirtualBox?
@John C Smith: I got sidetracked by a few things, only got around to the media install part but haven't created the DEMO yet. The other change from plan has been using CENTOS 5.x instead of OEL because I'm just not in the mood to deal with another Rube Goldberg experience. ;)
I will post more as I make progress.
Another issue with using the OVM templates is that they are usually a minor version or two behind. The set on eDelivery right now is 8.50 while 8.52 is out already.
Amr, I sympathize with you. I documented the steps here if you are still interested in creating a VirtualBox image from the PeopleSoft OVM templates. Right now I just have the steps for the DB image. I expect the tools image to be extremely similar.
I spent several sleepless nights trying to figure this out. I even gave up and installed the DB directly. Then I had one of those light-bulb moments, made a couple of very minor changes to the initialization scripts, and had a working PeopleSoft DB with recompiled binaries and everything. It was pretty sweet once I knew what I was doing.
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