I had OIM installed in a sandbox VM a few months ago and decided to spin it back up in our private cloud environment. The novelty of being able to so very simply allocate, deallocate, and reallocate resources when needed to various environments still hasn’t worn off for me.

I’m sure one day in the somewhat near future, this luxury will be commonplace even for lesser-sophisticated IT shops…and we will be telling stories to new team members of “the [not as good] old days” when we had to actually purchase physical hardware for each new project, how sizing hardware was a carefully meticulous process for every single server instance, how cloning environments required a [sometimes complicated] plan to be executed, and how sometimes the fastest way to get back up and running from a hardware failure was to actually fix the hardware.

[learn_more caption=”Click for digressions”] I can envision witnessing the conversation: “Hey Jimmy. Back in 20XX, can you imagine places existed where it would be acceptable to take the necessary downtime on their applications and actually wait for the Dell rep to come in to replace their faulty RAM!? Yes, applications ran directly on OS’s that were installed directly on physical hardware. What’s Dell you ask? Why, that was a company that made server hardware. My goodness, have you ever seen a physical server before, Jimmy?” Okay, I might have gotten a little carried away there — but then again, maybe not. (I tend to believe that promising, compelling technology will advance much faster than we expect. I know the people who devised IPv4 never dreamed they would ever run out of IP addresses, yet here we are just 30 some years later and we allocated the last available block last month.)

[box type=”shadow”] Food for thought: Why do we refer to spinning up or spinning down VMs? I tend to hear it more for VMs as opposed to physical hardware, which seems kind of funny does it not? Further, as we make a move to solid state hard drives, the analogy of “spinning” for computers, hard drives, etc. — let alone logical entities like VMs — seems it will soon become a complete misnomer.
[/box] [/learn_more]
On a slightly less nostalgic note, as I look at this OIM environment, I have to mention that I do like the latest look-and-feel that is part of the Oracle Middleware 11g stack. In addition to the niceties of a richer experience with ADF, Oracle has even taken the time to design icons and, in some cases like OIM, a nice-looking diagram on the login page.