WebLogic Admin Tricks & Tips

As part of "Ansible automation for WebLogic" series - in this post we are going to install the WebLogic 12.2.1.3.0 quick installer. There is very interesting research on how and when to use ansible modules for WebLogic. This is true weekend I set my time to have how this ansible automation works for WebLogic installation task, serious focused on this task. Prerequisites We have already seen in the earlier posts [if not visited yet please do visit] following links: Java Installation using ansible playbook WebLogic installer unarchive copy response file, oraInst.loc file to remote node Writing Playbook with command In this post, I've explored on the below mentioned best suitable ansible modules command module pause module The command module is better one,  I've choosen after trying with shell module. Installing WebLogic is a single command that need to executed on the remote node.  As we already copied the WebLogic installer and response file, oraInst....

Current IT Trending towards devOps automation in every Software product development. I am also part of  this devOps culture. I had a thought that, How much I can leverage my regular task by making simple shell script for Installation task. As every Oracle WebLogic system administrator would pass through this situation but only few of them who have "AUTOMATION IN MINDS" could attempt to resolve this with a nicely blended Shell script. Here I would like to target two types of installations with two different Shell scripts: Fusion Middleware 12.2.1.2.0 WebLogic Server installation Fusion Middleware 12.2.1.2.0 Infrastructure installation Objective of this script is to get single hit would do multiple tasks such as: JAVA installation setting the JAVA_HOME in shell profile using Java run the WebLogic installer in silent mode YOu can use the same logic in WebLogic 14c the latest version as well. Assumptions: Downloaded Software will be stored in c...

Hey Middleware Expert, I am going to discuss the Kubernetes cluster deployment. This is most important for the topic in Kubernetes in pod management with replicas and deployment for application Lifecycle management. MiniKube having built-in Kubernetes Dashboard. This post is a continuation of  our  previous post " Learning  1. Minikube  Kubernetes Cluster  Running in the Oracle VirtualBox" . Create a new deployment using a Kubernetes dashboard To create the new deployment in the minikube Kubernetes dashboard click on the 'deployments' under the workload. On the top right select +CREATE  and there are : CREATE FROM TEXT INPUT CREATE FROM FILE CREATE AN APP Select the third option Minikube dash board deployment of WebLogic  For the App Name, we’ll call this deployment 'wls-app'. Container image for WebLogic 12c we will take  ismaleiva90/weblogic12:latest. Here I've used docker pull for this image once it is available in the local docker registry the...

My learning Kubernetes Cluster is an essential skill for SRE DevOps Engineers on any Cloud platforms. My learning capability keep growing with this daily dose !! :) I like the statement given in one of the author -Kubernetes is like captain of ship where multiple container clusters carried in the huge ship. This is a first step that will help you to enter into world of Kubernetes cluster technologies. Kubernetes is also known as k8s, this is quite young technology in the DevOps stack. Here we have two options to work-out on Learning Kubernetes: Kubernetes installing in master-slave in multiple nodes Minikube running a locally single node The first option will be used in real-time production environments, and the other is used for learning purposes. Here I've selected the second option for running WebLogic on Minikube. Benefits of Kubernetes cluster There are many benefits but in brief for WebLogic   Kubernetes is the core component in Cloud Native Engineering pla...

The containerization concept was available since the 1978s in the UNIX. but the real usage and evaluation started from the year 2014 onward, a small community of docker open-source organizations started to focus on it and developing it. In the last post, we had the unofficial image then it went up the size up to 3.8 GB. But same logic if we try on Oracle Linux 7-Slim version image it reduced 1 GB!!!   Use Layered approach for Oracle images   Most of the developers question how do we deliver it to end-user when you create the containers for WebLogic. The best practice to use the layered approach for WebLogic applications. We have demonstrated with the following layer approach the whole stack is going to break down into two major parts: Read-only  Read-write  The latest image is on top which is only allows you to modify the content. where application jar/war/ear file will be deployed. The bottom stack will be re-used by multiple developers to build ...

Ansible is a task execution engine. Ansible is designed to work on multiple machines to execute the batch of simple task to scale. Ansible is written in Python language, it uses Python 2.6 above is supported platform as requirement. No Agents required! Ansible is simple language that is started as opensource and later it is acquired by Red Hat. The core communication happens with SSH. SSH widely available trusted in all UNIX and Linux systems. Ansible can be run any system as it doesn't relay on central machine. Ansible automation for Java and WebLogic 12c  Here my experiment goes with two Ubuntu 14 Trusty Tahr machine. In one machine Ansible will be installed and other machine is used as target node, in real-time scenario the target list can be many hundreds and this has been proven by NASA and other Ansible implements. Using Ansible lots of organizations get into structured and role based automation implementations successful. For Redhat flavors The actions that n...

We have a couple of options to create the docker images. In the last post, we got the docker installed Linux environment available. Now in this post, we will develop the Dockerfile such that it can create an image that can have Java JRE installed and WebLogic 12c installed. Lets jump on the task where we will prepare, create the Dockerfile and build the image and run the container to check all done successful. Prepare software installation Remember that official images always the preferable choice. When you search for docker images from the public repository that is hub.docker.com. We might get a huge list some of them are Automated some of them are not. The only one will be committed as an Official Image. Here selecting an image is also a strategy, logic inside. So carefully proceed further. We need to install Java Development Kit JDK latest version and WebLogic in silent mode installation. Step 1: Copy installers to data folder this is my convention I've used Here f...

In the earlier post you have seen how to use docker-compose for WebLogic images to build and also run the container with new application deployment. In this post you will be able to see the WebLogic managed servers forms cluster and the application will be deployed on top of it. Prerequisites Let me keep the list of prerequisite steps which you can follow my previous blog post or youtube video.  docker pull oraclelinux:7-slim   git clone https://github.com/oracle/docker-images.git  download server-jre1.8 latest version copy to OracleJava/dockerfiles build the image and make it as oracle/serverjre:8 download weblogic 12.2.1.2.0 quick installer which is used for development, it is small in size. image name it as oracle/weblogic:12.2.1.2-developer   create new docker images where 12212-domain:latest using WLST and shell script which are available in container scripts.  create new docker images named as 1221-appdeploy:latest where it uses 12212-doma...

Writing this blog post after couple of executions experiments and research on docker. The basic requirement for docker is there must be a Linux/Unix based platform. Here I am creating that one on my Windows host machine, and the guest Ubuntu Trusty64 platform with the help of Vagrant and Oracle Virtualbox provider. vagrant Ubuntu docker - Oracle Linux images In this Article I am not dicuss about from the scratch What is docker etc. I'm not talking about Virtualization vs Containerization. Create testnode1 folder on the Windows machine. I've created on F:\testnode1. The Vagrantfile to launch Ubuntu Trusty64 Virtual machine is as follows: Vagrantfile # -*- mode: ruby -*- # vi: set ft=ruby : Vagrant.configure(2) do |config| config.vm.define "test" do |testnode1| testnode1.vm.box = "williamyeh/ubuntu-trusty64-docker" testnode1.vm.hostname="testnode1.vybhava.com" testnode1.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.33...

Administrators with automation skill would perform than many admins. Requirement makes you to write automation scripts. I was working on Oracle Virtual Box, which is running SSH service. Hence I am able to connected thru PUTTy to the ubuntu Guest Linux server. By making Static IP configuration on the additional network adapter this was happen to possible.  Everything going good! when I ran the WebLogic server from the PuTTY. It is working until when it is connected and alive. Once I went for break/Lunch the Windows system went to sleep then WebLogic server stopped due to PuTTY session inactive. To avoid this we can use the Wrapper start scripts.  Idea behind the wrapper script/ psuedo code Using the startWebLogic.sh script in background using & use the nohup -- no hungup to run the process even the PuTTY inactive or closed The log file generated by starting WebLogic server redirected to a separate file. The Standard error file also merged with standard output log...

Dear WebLogic users/Administrator you might already visited many other sites that discussed about - how to take the thread dump. But here I am going to tell you about automation script makes more simplified way of working, with more information - almost 70% on the occasion of STUCK thread Thread dumps will reveals. In case of High CPU utilization situations, which method is badly working. Step by Step analysis for Thread Dump Thread dump troubleshooting from Jerry Chan Step 1: Automated Thread Dump for WebLogic Take the Thread dump for a managed server that have issues or slowness or latency etc. You just read the description and start applying to your test environment and then try out on your Live environments. Cheers! #!/bin/bash # This script will takes the managed server name as argument and it will work generic to Linux or SunOS or HP-UX. # The only ps command options varies for each platform # Kill -3 command used for every 10 seconds of interval. You can increa...

Trick on grep Normally every WebLogic user/Admin knows that "ps -ef|grep java" gives you the WebLogic servers process list in any UNIX or Linux environments. Most of the forums suggesting use "|grep -v" to exclude the "grep line". But, here I don't want to use one more pipe and grep -v option really makes expensive in CPU cycles. Searched for the optimistic solutions and finally found! Two choices using --exclude  and using regex. The exclude options is not available on all UNIX systems. So I've chosen next option. How do you avoid the grep line in the grep command output itself? Here the trick is using the regular expression to workout this requirement. Use your searching pattern any one of the character in [] then it will automatically excludes the grep line from the output. actually it wouldn't get output itself! bash-2.05$ ps -ef |grep jav[a] weblogic   950   934  0   Feb 10 ?        0:06 /usr/local/bea/jdk142_11/bin/java -clie...

Problem: Closing startWebLogic.cmd execution window - SHUTDOWN server We were working on Oracle Fusion Middleware environment, where the WLS_FORMS managed server was down. We need to bring it up by starting the server immediately, because it is live we have tried to start with nodemanager. But, it is failed! due to the stdout log rotation failure unable to start the managed server. The servers running on the same Windows machine are well and RUNNING state. Production environments we cannot keep a server DOWN for longer time. So first we tried with immediate temporary solution is to start the managed server from the domain home we need to keep a CMD window open. If someone logged in and closed the window the server will be down again! In UNIX we have nohup and &(ampersand) to run in the background. Now we need similar solution in Windows platform. After working in Unix platform for many years, felt Windows is hard to us!!! There is always a way for this problem. Solution we iden...

You might be wonder what is fun in this blog looking for X11 forwarding on Solaris 5.10!! You might be excited to see the beauty of colorful Oracle Fusion Middleware WebLogic 11g installation window when you executable binaries (wls1033_solaris32.bin), You might wish to see Oracle WebLogic domain configuration Wizard (config.sh), Oracle WebLogic Domain Template builder (config_builder.sh), BEA Smart Update (bsu.sh) windows or your Oracle Database 11g while you work on a remote UNIX machines. After spending few hours on the Internet found many blogs written on their experiences, few document on websites, which illustrated about SSH, X11 forwarding in UNIX. I understand that what I need to do? To achieve my objective X11 Forwarding using SSH window, I must have a X emulating software installed on my desktop. you guys have this on your desktop?? If not install Hummingbird Connectivity (Xming is alternative) My experimenting environment is Solaris 10, Oracle WebLogic, SSH ...