At M&S, we are going virtual all the way. We have delivered a number of virtualized environments for customers. Some have been for Oracle Middleware solutions, some for complete Microsoft domains. Some for open source system. And many for development instances.

We have tinkered with going totally virtual for own infrastructure over the years, but decided to avoid biting the bullet for a number of reasons: migration time/effort has typically been at the top of the list. But with the improvements in virtualization technology, advantages proven now over years, apparent “stickiness” of the leading players, our own maturity in this space, and general adoption by the community at large (more clearly read, “readily available support”), we are diving in.

Over the next few weeks and months, each component of the M&S infrastructure will be moved to virtual machines. Certain details of our infrastructure will not be posted on this blog for security reasons, but there are team members working on this who will try to keep the blog up-to-date. If you are interested in how things are going, feel free to contact us. We are excited about this ride.

When installing 10g OID on OEL5, if you run into the following error, you can run the below commands to address the issue:

Error:

OPMN HTTP process fails to start.  When you look in the log file, it says:
/Apache/Apache/bin/httpd: error while loading shared libraries: libdb.so.2: cannot open shared object file:  No such file or directory

To fix, run the following commands:

# ln -s /usr/lib/libgdbm.so.2.0.0 /usr/lib/libdb.so.2
# chmod 755 /usr/lib/libgdbm.so.2.0.0
# chmod 755 /usr/lib/libdb.so.2

We have recently been working on and completed an entire Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g environment setup for a customer:

• Identity Management
• WebCenter (Framework and Services)
• SOA Suite
• UCM

This article is part of the recent work short blurb series.

If there were a buzz word that could compete with the speed to fame, breadth of use (and misuse), and popularity of “Web 2.0″, it would have to be “Cloud Computing”.

I was trying to figure out Amazon EC2 pricing recently, and found myself pulling out a calculator for what they really should provide readily. So, here is a a quick table you can multi-sort that will provide you a format you can actually use to make cost comparisons.

The economy is evolving, technology is getting better, and overall, the game is changing with cloud computing. M&S is now resellers for the Amazon EC2 Cloud, providing customers with access and expertise to make their enterprises run on “the cloud”. To host an enterprise environment, let alone Oracle, simply does not appear cost effective in the long run. In fact, I am open to healthy discussion contending that statement.

I just copied an Oracle Enterprise Linux VM from one Windows machine to another and the IP address for the guest Linux machine changed. I had a feeling that this might happen, but wasn’t quite sure why it did nor how to get it back to the old IP address. As we all know, an IP address changing in an Oracle environment is best avoided.

Many Oracle VM templates come with a default firewall policy turned on.  You can disable it by running the following commands as root:

chkconfig iptables off
service iptables save
service iptables stop