Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBIA) 11.1.1.10.2 Installation on Oracle Linux 7.2 - Inst

This is the fifth in a series of posts regarding installing BI Apps 11.1.1.10.2 on Oracle Linux 7.2. For your reference, here is a list of URLs for each of the posts that make up this series:

In this post, I will be discussing how to install the WebLogic 11gR1 (10.3.6) Java EE Application Server. A quick note for any WebLogic veterans out there, this process does not create a WebLogic domain. The WebLogic domain will be configured later on in the OBIA installation process.

General Assumptions and Conventions Used

I will assume that readers of this blog have read the prior blog entries in this series before continuing.

Installation

Ensuring the system locale is set to Unicode

Before we start installing WebLogic, we need to ensure the the locale of the operating system is set to Unicode. According to the Fusion Middleware Requirements, Oracle "highly recommends that you enable Unicode support by setting the LANG and LC_ALL environment variables to a locale with the UTF-8 character set.". So, how does one go about doing this?

It's important to note that locale settings can be different for each user. In order to tell what the locale settings are for the obia11g user, log on as obia11g and issue the following command from the terminal:

$ locale

Here is a screenshot of the output of this command when I issue it on my system as the obia11g user:

In addition to the output of this command which is user-specific, we need to confirm the locale of the system. In order to do this, issue the following command:

$ cat /etc/locale.conf

Here is a screenshot of the output of this command when I issue it on my system:

From this, we can derive three key pieces of information:

The locale of the system is set to en_CA.UTF-8 (note: to decipher this, the en part stands for English, the CA part stands for Canada and the UTF-8 part stands for Unicode).
The LANG variable for the obia11g user is also en_CA.UTF-8. In other words, the obia11g user is using the default system locale.
The locale of both the user and the system is a Unicode-based locale (and therefore we satisfy Oracle's requirements thus far).

You may also notice that the LC_ALL variable is not set. Again according to the documentation, Oracle recommends setting this variable as well. In order to do that, simply add the following two lines to the obia11g user's ~/.bashrc file:

LC_ALL=en_CA.UTF-8

export LC_ALL

Then log out and log back in, and when you issue the locale command again from your terminal session you should see that the LC_ALL variable is also populated as per the following screenshot:

There is some question as to whether this last step is required. This is because one should not need to set the LC_ALL variable if the rest of the locale (specifically the LANG variable) is set correctly. However, I personally choose to perform this step because this is what the Oracle documentation says to do. To provide a bit of additional context, my experience with OBIA 11g installations (and really, this point applies to all enterprise software in general) is that they tend to be very finicky and so I have learned - the hard way I might add - that one should stray from following the installation instructions at one's own peril. Theoretically though, the installation of OBIA 11g could proceed and finish successfully without the setting of this LC_ALL variable, however I personally have just never tried to do it.

Lastly, it is important to note that if you try running the locale command after setting the LANG and LC_ALL varialbes and you get error messages, please contact your Linux system administrator as this is most likely a sign that the Unicode locales have not been generated for your system, and you will need to do this before continuing.

Unzipping the WebLogic 10.3.6 generic installer

Now that the locale has been properly set, it's time to begin the installation of WebLogic 10.3.6. Firstly, we need to unzip the generic installer. As already discussed in previous blog entries, I will assume that the V29856-01.zip file has been downloaded from eDelivery and placed in the /u01/sw/weblogic directory. To unzip, issue the following commands:

$ cd /u01/sw/weblogic

$ unzip V29856-01.zip

Once done, you'll see that the zip file contained one file: wls1036_generic.jar:

Creating/Altering the Silent Installation file

In order to perform a silent installation of WebLogic, you'll need to prepare a silent installation file. I have prepared such a file and stored it in my GitHub Account here. For the purposes of this blog, we will download this file and store it in /u01/sw/scripts.

This particular file has already been altered to suit the installation in this blog. If you want to choose different paths or select different values, this file is well-documented. However, please note that all subsequent blog entries in this series will assume that the WebLogic installation uses this file as-is without any changes.

Here is a screenshot of the relevant portion of this file where the key variables of BEAHOME, WLS_INSTALL_DIR, OCP_INSTALL_DIR, NODEMGR_PORT and LOCAL_JVMS are all set:

Running the installer

Now that the generic installer jar file has been extracted to /u01/sw/weblogic and the silent installation file has been downloaded to /u01/sw/scripts, we can proceed with the silent installation. Issue the following commands to do a silent installation of WebLogic:

$ cd /u01/sw/weblogic

$ umask 027

$ java -d64 -jar wls1036_generic.jar -mode=silent -silent_xml=/u01/sw/scripts/weblogic1036_silent_install.xml -log=/u01/app/obia11g/logs/weblogic/weblogic_server_install.log

When finished, open the weblogic_server_install.log file located in /u01/app/obia11g/logs/weblogic in your text editor and check the very last line - you should see something resembling the following:

2016-08-15 15:33:28,893 INFO [WizardController] com.bea.plateng.wizard.silent.tasks.LogTask - The installation was successfull!

Please note that this log file contains many warnings (i.e. lines or groups of lines that contain WARN) - it is safe to disregard all of them. These messages are not unique to a silent install and also appear when running a GUI-based install.

Running the above command will install WebLogic into the following directory:

/u01/app/obia11g/product/11.1.1/mwhome_1

This location is also referred to as the "Middleware Home" for your installation.

Making changes to .bashrc

Once installation is complete I recommend creating a few variables in ~/.bashrc to make things easier to work with in future stages of this installation process (and management of the system after the installation has completed as well).

Firstly, we'll create a variable called ORACLE_BASE which will point to the /u01/app/obia11g directory. Next, we'll create a variable named MW_HOME (for Middleware Home) which will point to the directory where WebLogic was just installed. Lastly, we'll create a variable named WL_HOME (for WebLogic Home) which will point to the WebLogic subdirectory underneath the Middleware Home.

To do all of this, please add the following to the obia11g user's .bashrc file (~/.bashrc):

ORACLE_BASE=/u01/app/obia11g

export ORACLE_BASE

MW_HOME=$ORACLE_BASE/product/11.1.1/mwhome_1

export MW_HOME

WL_HOME=$MW_HOME/wlserver_10.3

export WL_HOME

Then log out and log back in. If you echo each of the above 3 variables, they should resolve as shown in the following screenshot:

Copying the JRE endorsed libraries

Once installation is complete, we need to copy three jar files from the weblogic folder to a subdirectory underneath the Java Home. In order to do this, we first need to create the new endorsed directory. Please issue the following command to do so:

$ mkdir -p $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/endorsed

Then, copy the three libraries by issuing the following three commands:

$ cp $MW_HOME/modules/javax.annotation_1.0.0.0_1-0.jar $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/endorsed $ cp $MW_HOME/modules/javax.xml.bind_2.1.1.jar $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/endorsed $ cp $MW_HOME/modules/javax.xml.ws_2.1.1.jar $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/endorsed

Increase memory for bsu.sh

The installation process for OBIA involves the application of a lot of pre-packaged patches across a wide variety of components. In the past, I have run into Java memory issues - especially when using Java 7 on WebLogic 10.3.6. The details of these failures are outlined in Oracle Support Doc Id 2007492.1. Having the OBIA installation fail can become very painful when you try to figure out what failed, roll back to the point prior to failure, and then redoing the installation from that point onward. In order to avoid this pain, I always increase the memory as per the instructions conained in this document.

In order to do so, please open $MW_HOME/utils/bsu.sh in your text editor, comment out the line that begins with MEM_ARGS, and add a new MEM_ARGS line like the following:

MEM_ARGS="-Xms1024m -Xmx1024m"

Here is a screenshot of my bsu.sh file after completing this change:

Summary

In this blog, we installed WebLogic 11gR1 (10.3.6) silently, created some new system environment variables, and essentially readied the WebLogic installation to layer on the additional components of the OBIA 11g software suite.

Looking ahead

In my next blog entry, I will describe how to do a silent installation of the OBIEE 11.1.1.9 Repository Creation Utility (RCU).