Quickstart Guide to Using Oracle Appliance for SOA/BPM

Recently I have been setting up some machines for fellow engineers.  My base setup consists of Oracle Enterprise Linux with Oracle Virtual Box.  Note that after installing VirtualBox I needed to add the VirtualBox Extension Pack to enable RDP access amongst other features.  In order to get them started quickly with some images I downloaded the pre-built appliance for SOA/BPM from OTN.

Out of the box this provides a VirtualBox image that is pre-installed with everything you will need to develop SOA/BPM applications.

Specifically by using the virtual appliance I got the following pre-installed and configured.

• Oracle Enterprise Linux 5
• User oracle password oracle
• User root password oracle.
• Oracle Database XE
• Pre-configured with SOA/BPM repository.
• Set to auto-start on OS startup.
• Oracle SOA Suite 11g PS2
• Configured with a “collapsed domain”, all services (SOA/BAM/EM) running in AdminServer.
• Listening on port 7001
• Oracle BPM Suite 11g
• Configured in same domain as SOA Suite.
• Oracle JDeveloper 11g
• With SOA/BPM extensions.

Networking

The VM by default uses NAT (Network Address Translation) for network access.  Make sure that the advanced settings for port forwarding allow access through the host to guest ports.  It should be pre-configured to forward requests on the following ports

Note that only one VirtualBox image can use a given host port, so make sure you are not clashing if it seems not to work.

What’s Left to Do?

There is still some customization of the environment that may be required.

If you need to configure a proxy server as I did then for the oracle and root users to set up an HTTP proxy

• Added “export http_proxy=http://proxy-host:proxy-port” to ~oracle/.bash_profile and ~root/.bash_profile
• Added “export http_proxy=http://proxy-host:proxy-port” to /etc/.bashrc
• Edited System->Preferences to set Network Proxy
• In Firefox set Preferences->Network->Connection Settings to “Use system proxy settings”
• In JDeveloper set Edit->Preferences->Web Browser and Proxy to required proxy settings

You may need to configure yum to point to a public OEL yum repository – such as http://public-yum.oracle.com.

If you are going to be accessing the SOA server from outside the VirtualBox image then you may want to set the soa-infra Server URLs to be the hostname of the host OS.

Snap!

Once I had the machine configured how I wanted to use it I took a snapshot so that I can always get back to the pristine install I have now.  Snapshots are one of the big benefits of putting a development environment into a virtualized environment.  I can make changes to my installation and if I mess it up I can restore the image to a last known good snapshot.

Hey Presto!, Ready to Go

This is the quickest way to get up and running with SOA/BPM Suite.  Out of the box the download will work, I only did extra customization so I could use services outside the firewall and browse outside the firewall from within by SOA VirtualBox image.  I also use yum to update the OS to the latest binaries.

So have fun.