Month: September 2023

Oracle EBS R12 Vision Instance

On By windows7bugsIn NOT a DBA, Oracle Applications(R12)Leave a comment

Did you ever wish for having your own copy of Oracle EBS R12? Well, Oracle provides a copy that is all yours called VISION instance. The below post is one of the best I came across, explaining how to setup your own VISION instance on Oracle VirtualBox

Get your own Oracle EBS R12.2 Instance On VirtualBox

I hope, it was an easy ride. Oracle’s virtual appliance is perfectly sized for moderate hardware, without GUI out of the box. We’ll see how to install GUI, configure the appliance for network access etcetera in this post.

Basically you get Oracle Linux 7.9 OS, EBS R12 12.2.10 with Oracle database 19.9 in this appliance. You must update the OS to latest before installing GUI. So, let us setup the environment for the update now.

Stop the running application and database instances.

su - oracle
cd /u01/install/APPS/scripts
./stopapps.sh
./stopdb.sh

Oracle has the appliance set to start the database and application instances automatically during every reboot. I strongly suggest you to disable the automatic start of these instances. Oracle starts “ebscdb” and “apps” services every time when the box restarts. We can disable these services using chkconfig command

chkconfig apps off
chkconfig ebscdb off

That’s it. Now, when you restart the box, Oracle services will not start automatically.

Shutdown the server. Change the network configuration for the sever like seen in the below image.

This means, your server will start sharing the host’s active connection(s). If your host machine has an active internet connection, your EBS server will able to access internet this way from it’s environment.

Start the EBS server and complete the OS update. This should be around 2.2GB total downloads and minimum 30-40 minutes, depending upon the hardware resources you have allocated for the virtual machine.

Once the box is update, proceed with “Server with GUI” group installation.

yum groupinstall "Server with GUI"

Restart the server after GUI installed. You can temporarily switch to graphical run level by issuing the command

systemctl isolate graphical.target

and to make the graphical interface as default, issue the below command as root

systemctl set-default graphical.target

Please note, your box doesn’t have VirtualBox extensions yet, which is a MUST for proper mouse integration and more. Prior installing the VirtualBox extensions, make sure to install kernel devel package. Issue the following command

yum install kernel-uek-devel

Additionally install the packages gcc, make & perl (pre-installed usually)

yum install gcc make perl -y

Reboot the server & install the VirtualBox extensions.

If you remember, we changed the network settings earlier for the update & if you try to start the database and application, this may not work. Depending upon how you want to access the VISION instance, you have to configure additional networking now. I suggest to leave the NAT configuration as it is and to configure an additional Network adapter for the intended connectivity.

For example, if you want to share the VISION instance with your teammates within a Class C network, do the following.

Use “Bridged Adapter” & select the adaptor that is connected to the network under “Name”. Recent computers have multiple network and WiFi adapters & selecting the correct adapter is very important for client connectivity. Make sure to setup “Promiscous Mode” to “Allow All”.

Find one free IP address and set up the same for your EBS VISION box. You will have to setup this information at multiple places.

For example, change the hosts file (most important)

Network settings. My box have NAT as first Network Adapter and Host Only network as 2nd Network Adapter. Hence my configurations are like below

For the NAT (Connection #1) I have the following setup

and for the Host Only network (Connection #2)

By having the NAT as first adapter, my box is able to connect to internet, shared from the host and my host can access the EBS instance from the virtual machine using the host only network.

That’s all folks.

Install Oracle Forms & Reports 12.2.1.19 on Windows

On By windows7bugsIn NOT a DBA, Oracle Forms, Weblogic, Windows 10, Windows 11Leave a comment

No post should look good, started with a statement asking the visitor to move on because “There is nothing much to see here”. Trust me, if you already referred my previous post(s) for Oracle Forms & Reports 12.2.1.4, then there is nothing new I have for you in this post. As I don’t have much to offer other than what I have already did through my previous post, let us see how we can insure your fresh attempt to get this whole complex stack installed & configured successfully on your computer.

Are you excited? Don’t be. Oracle has released the much waited Windows version for their Oracle Forms & Reports couple of days back and I must say, I was super excited based on the promises given about the IDE improvements. For improvements what I could see what line numbers inside PL/SQL editor.

Software Requirements

Side note before anything else. Please note, you must install software from the same architecture. Said, if you install JDK 32-Bit and expect your 64-Bit Weblogic to work properly, that is not going to happen. Hence insure all the software you download and install belong to the same architecture.

Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable packages (Specific to Weblogic 12.2)

and for Oracle Forms 12.2.1.19, you have to install Visual Studio 2017 VC++ compoments.

Oracle JDK

Weblogic Server Software

Oracle Forms & Reports 12.2.1.19

Before you start the installation, let’s do a checklist

  • Is your Windows machine updated with latest patches for OS and .Net?
  • Do you have a static IP address for your computer/laptop?
  • What is the name of your computer? does it looks like some random letters?
  • Have your read the installation document? :) nobody does it right?

Legal, cracked, pirated… OS comes in different flavors & nothing can stop it. However, keeping your box up to date is your responsibility. Oracle is a very complex technology, that depends upon many OS elements. A broken box will not get you anywhere.

Static IP address is 2nd most important element when you are installing a server software, that is WebLogic in our case. As this server has to be identified and reached by clients, a fixed IP address is a must, however not always possible when a user has limited infrastructure. Microsoft has provided “Microsoft Loopback” interface for such requirements. Please Google and find more about setting it up, if you are one of those users. Microsoft Loopback helps you to setup a static IP address, please note other computers in your network cannot reach your computer using this IP address or setup!

Name of your computer or HOST name. Much of the Computer/Laptop that you buy with Windows preinstalled come with some whacky names. You should change such names to something more meaningful like “JOHN-PC”,”XYZ” etecetra.

I didn’t either read installation manuals until recent times. I realized that, I could avoid hours or sometimes days long Googling merely by reading the instruction manuals.

Once you are done with Microsoft Visual Studio C++ redistributable package(s) installations, we can proceed. Please follow the below post that should take you through installation and setting up a classic weblogic domain, report server instance etc. I hope you will have least issues installating and configuring Oracle Forms & Reports following my post 🙏(Don’t get discouraged by the title of the referred post, as I stated in the beginning, there is nothing new HERE!). The one thing I want to warn you about the time that your computer might take to bring up the UI for the Oracle Forms & Reports installer. This could be nothing less that 7-8 minutes, much more depending upon your hardware resources.

Install Oracle forms & reports 12.2.1.4 with Weblogic 12c 12.2.1.4

All the best and if you are still stuck, do let me through comments!