Entries from Oracle E-Business Suite Technology tagged with 'apps tier'
OracleAS 10.1.3.5 Certified with E-Business Suite Release 12
Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.0 originally shipped with OracleAS 10.1.3 Oracle Containers for J2EE (OC4J) for running its Java-based content. Regular readers of this blog know that we certified OracleAS 10.1.3.4 with Apps 12 at the end of 2008, with additional operating system platforms following shortly afterwards. We've now certified Oracle Application Server 10g 10.1.3.5 OC4J with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12. You can upgrade to OracleAS 10.1.3.5 OC4J directly from OracleAS 10.1.3, 10.1.3.3, or 10.1.3.4. This certification allows you to upgrade the OC4J components in your R12 techstack to get take advantage of the latest performance and stability improvements in this incremental patchset.
Turbocharging Your EBS 12.0 Techstack Upgrade
All three of the major new technology stack components included in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.1 are also certified with Release 12.0. You could upgrade each of these R12.0 techstack components individually. But now that Release 12.1.1 is out, why bother with that older time-consuming and labour-intensive approach when there's a better way? You can use the EBS 12.1.1 Rapid Install to upgrade just the application and database tier technology stack components in your existing EBS 12.0 instance. Your technology stack components are upgraded to the same versions delivered with EBS 12.1.1 while leaving your EBS 12.0 product code (e.g. Financials, Supply Chain) untouched.
OPatch Essentials for Apps Sysadmins
All EBS administrators must become very familiar with the OPatch utility. OPatch is used to patch the ORACLE_HOMEs in EBS Application and Database tiers. Security fixes delivered for these ORACLE_HOMEs through Critical Patch Updates are also applied using OPatch. It updates the central and per-product inventories with the details of each patch applied. Apart from the Oracle Universal Installer (which internally also uses OPatch), this is the only tool authorized to patch ORACLE_HOMEs. Although it once had a reputation for being somewhat arcane, OPatch has evolved over the years into a more user-friendly and better-documented tool. I'll cover the essentials of using OPatch in this article.
Configuring SSL with a Configuration Wizard in EBS R12
E-Business Suite R12.1.1 provides Advanced Configuration wizards that make it easier to deploy features such as SSL and load-balancing. Apps administrators can use these wizards to make configuration changes online through Oracle Applications Manager (OAM) and then run AutoConfig on the applications tier to make the changes effective. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is one of the most commonly used configurations in EBS. I'll walk through the SSL Advanced Configuration Wizard in this article.
Confused About E-Business Server vs. Desktop Operating System Certifications?
The E-Business Suite is designed with a three-tier architecture, with functions running on a client tier, an applicatione server tier (also called a middle tier), and a database tier. I handled a customer question on an internal Oracle mailing list today that confused our certification policies for these tiers. I then realized that I've answered variants of this question many times lately, so it's clearly of broader interest. These two questions are mirror images of each other: * Can I install the E-Business Suite on a desktop operating system like Windows Vista? * Can I run end-user E-Business Suite functions on a server operating system like Oracle Enterprise Linux?
Oracle Universal Installer Inventory Essentials for Apps Sysadmins
We see quite a few Service Requests (SRs) where E-Business Suite customers have gotten into difficulty with the Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) Inventory. It's important to note the Oracle Universal Installer Inventory has nothing to do with the Oracle E-Business Suite Inventory product (product code INV).
The Oracle Universal Installer Inventory is a component of the OUI and creates a record of the Oracle homes, products and patches you have installed on a node. Whilst it's not part of the E-Business Suite, as an Applications DBA it's inevitable that sooner or later you will have to look after the Inventory. This article will focus on issues relating to the OUI Inventory specifically within the context of Oracle Applications.
An Overview of the OUI Inventory
The Oracle Universal Installer Inventory comprises three main components:
- The Pointer File
- The Central (Global) Inventory
- The Home (Local) Inventory
Is It Safe to Use SANs for EBS R12 Instance Tops?
Our documentation about sharing filesystems between multiple Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 application servers recommends that you install the Instance Top (INST_TOP) on a local filesystem. This has prompted an interesting discussion about whether this is really mandatory, or whether it's technically feasible to put the Instance Top on, say, a dedicated fibre-attached SAN.
Our guidance on the INST_TOP being installed on a local file system is based on three major considerations:
- Separation of duties and security implications
- Impact of SAN performance on Apache
- Additional troubleshooting complexity
Latest Apps 11i Techstack (ATG RUP 7) Now Available
I'm very pleased to announce that the latest ATG Family Pack H Rollup 7 for the E-Business Suite Release 11i technology stack is now available for download from Metalink.
The official name for this patch is:
- Oracle Applications Technology 11i.ATG_PF.H.delta.7 (RUP7) (Patch 6241631)
In other words, this is the seventh consolidated rollup of patches released on top of 11i.ATG_PF.H. For the Oracryptoanalysts out there who like to track nomenclature variants of these things, this patch is also referred to as the Applications Technology Group (ATG) Family Pack H Rollup 7.
This Rollup patch is a collection of technology-stack patches that can safely be applied on top of the ATG Family Pack H. This Rollup patch is cumulative: all previous patches released for Family Pack H since the initial 11.5.10 release are included in this latest patch, including:
- ATG Rollup 6 (Patch 5903765)
- ATG Rollup 5 (Patch 5473858)
- ATG Rollup 4 (Patch 4676589)
- ATG Rollup 3 (Patch 4334965)
New Apps 11i Autoconfig Rollup Patch T Now Available
E-Business Suite 11i Technology Stack latest Rollup(patch 8217898) for Autoconfig is now available for download. This Rollup includes fixes and enhancements to Autoconfig and its configuration templates. You should review the README before applying the patch.
This cumulative patch includes all previously released AutoConfig updates, including the previous Autoconfig Rollup - RUP-S 6372396. RUP T can be applied standalone. It will be included in the next EBS Applications Technology Family Pack - ATG PF-H RUP 7.
Latest DSTv11 Timezone Patches Available for E-Business Suite
For reasons mysterious to me, world governments apparently like to change their timezones on a regular basis. If your E-Business Suite Release 11i or 12 environment has been configured to support Daylight Saving Time (DST) or international time zones, it's important that you keep your timezone definition files up-to-date. They were last changed in February 2009, and they've been updated once again: DSTv11 is now available and certified with the E-Business Suite.
Choosing a Shared File System for Oracle E-Business Suite
It's possible to scale up your E-Business Suite environment with multiple application tier servers to improve fault tolerance and performance. It's also possible to share a single filesystem between them: all application tier files are installed on a single shared disk resource that's mounted from each application tier node. In Release 12, that would look like this:
This allows you to apply patches once to the central filesystem, rather than maintaining each application tier server node individually. We recommend this approach; it reduces maintenance overheads for those multiple servers and shortens your patching downtimes.
Beginning with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, we also allow you to share an applications tier file system between multiple E-Business Suite database instances, too. For more details about this advanced option, see this article.
Customers embarking upon this path inevitably ask, "Which shared filesystem do you recommend?" The short answer is that we don't recommend any specific filesystem, but there's more to it than just that.
Comparisons of E-Business Suite Release 12 Rapid Install Techstacks
A reader recently asked where she could find a summary of the E-Business Suite Release 12 technology stack components for different R12 releases. As it turns out, there's a long answer to this deceptively-simple question. This level of information is spread in a variety of release-specific Notes, making it tricky to compare which components were delivered as part of each Apps 12 Rapid Install.
Here's a high-level architectural diagram showing an overview of the major techstack components in R12:
It's possible to add on additional database options not shown above, including 11g Advanced Compression, 11g Advanced Security, and others.
Here's a summary of the versions for the important major techstack components that were included in the Rapid Install footprints for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12:
| EBS Release 12 Rapid Install Version | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 12.0.0 | 12.0.4 | 12.1.1 | |
| Database | 10.2.0.2 | 10.2.0.4 | 11.1.0.7 |
| OracleAS 10.1.2 Forms & Reports | 10.1.2.0.2 | 10.1.2.2 | 10.1.2.3 |
| OracleAS 10.1.3 OC4J | 10.1.3.0.0 | 10.1.3.0.0 | 10.1.3.4 |
| App Tier Java (JDK) | 1.5.0_10 | 1.5.0_13 | 1.6.0_10 |
| Desktop Client Java (JRE) | 1.5.0_10-erdist | 1.5.0_13 | 1.6.0_u10 |
Understanding J2SE 1.5 End-of-Life Implications for Oracle E-Business Suite
As with my previous post about the desupport of Sun's Java 1.4 release, you should be aware that the equivalent end-of-life for Sun's J2SE 1.5 is coming up in October 2009.
Implications for E-Business Suite Users
Here are the implications if your Apps 11i or 12 environments are running on servers with J2SE 1.5:
- If you log a Service Request for your environment, Oracle will continue to perform its usual diagnosis, triage, and search through our knowledge base for existing patches and workarounds. This assistance may be constrained by limited access to a small number of remaining environments running J2SE 1.5. It is extremely unlikely that we will issue new Apps patches for new compatibility issues identified with the E-Business Suite and J2SE 1.5.
- Source and target location of individual templates
- Time consumed to instantiate or execute each template
- Execution report for each template
Which is Better: Forms Servlet or Socket Mode?
Many products within the Oracle E-Business Suite have screens that are built with Oracle Forms. Oracle Forms can be run in either servlet mode or socket mode. Apps 11i is based on Forms 6i and is configured to run in socket mode by default. Apps 12 is based on Forms 10g and is configured to run in servlet mode by default. What are these modes, and which is better?
What is Forms Servlet Mode?
The Forms Listener Servlet is a Java servlet that delivers the ability to run Oracle Forms applications over HTTP and HTTPS connections. It manages the creation of a Forms Server Runtime process for each client, as well as network communications between the client and its associated Forms Server Runtime process.
The desktop client sends HTTP requests and receives HTTP responses from the web server. The HTTP Listener on the web server acts as the network endpoint for the client, keeping other servers and ports from being exposed at the firewall.
Interim Update: ATG RUP 7 for E-Business Release 11i
The last major update to the E-Business Suite Release 11i's technology stack was released in late 2007. This is available via the Applications Technology Group Rollup Patchset 6, also known as ATG RUP 6. Since then, we've been a little preoccupied with Apps 12. Now that we've gotten three new R12 releases under our belts, our attentions are turning back to Apps 11i.
Updating the Default JDK Installed in OracleAS 10g
If you run Java-based applications in your organization, you're aware that you may wish to optionally update the Java Development Kit (JDK) libraries periodically to get the latest fixes for security, stability, and performance. This applies to the E-Business Suite, naturally, so we regularly release new certifications for the latest Java releases for EBS.
Perhaps lesser-known is that this also applies to external servers running Oracle Fusion Middleware -- also known as Oracle Application Server 10g. You may have deployed Oracle Application Server 10g on one or more application tier servers to use Discoverer, Single Sign-On, Oracle Internet Directory, Portal, or other Fusion Middleware services with the E-Business Suite.
Power Tools: Previewing AutoConfig Changes on All Tiers
[Editor's Note: This is the third of a series of four articles on new AutoConfig features. These articles are written by members of our AutoConfig Development team. This is your opportunity to interact directly with that team with your feedback on this tool.]
When we first launched AutoConfig for E-Business Suite environments, it quickly became clear that your confidence in the tool would depend upon your ability to review its actions before committing to its changes to your environments. The AutoConfig Check Config tool (adchkcfg) is used to identify the potential changes that would take effect on an E-Business Suite instance during the next AutoConfig run.
Until now, that tool has only been reporting expected changes to the file system and the database profile values. The adchkcfg tool has now been enhanced to report information about important non-profile database updates also. The enhanced report will help customers understand potential system configuration changes, thus minimizing custom configuration errors.
What Does the Check Config Report Show?
The Check Config tool generates a report in both HTML and text format. The text report for the database changes can be used for quick reference from the command line.
Here is a screenshot of the new Check Config HTML report (click to enlarge):
Power Tools: Running AutoConfig in Parallel in EBS 12
[Editor's Note: This is the second of a series of four articles on new AutoConfig features. These articles are written by members of our AutoConfig Development team. This is your opportunity to interact directly with that team with your feedback on this tool.]
Our last article discussed ways of tuning your AutoConfig runs via profiling reports that identify bottlenecks during template instantiation. This article discusses another method of speeding up your AutoConfig runs. In an R12 E-Business Suite instance, AutoConfig can now be run simultaneously across multiple nodes. This new feature significantly lowers maintenance downtime for multi-node installations. One beta customer of this feature improved the time it takes them to run AutoConfig across their dozen mid tiers by 45%.
How Does AutoConfig's Parallel Mode Work?
Executing AutoConfig in 'parallel mode' engages a locking mechanism so that processes running on individual nodes are synchronized. This mechanism prevents any conflicting updates to the database or the file system. The following figure illustrates AutoConfig running in parallel across multiple nodes:
Power Tools: Optimizing AutoConfig Performance Through Profiling
[Editor's Note: This is the first of a series of four articles on new AutoConfig features. These articles are written by members of our AutoConfig Development team. This is your chance to get the inside track on these advanced features and provide your feedback directly to our developers.]
Ever wonder what's taking up the time during a given AutoConfig run in your E-Business Suite environment? Want to optimize the performance of your techstack configuration customizations? The AutoConfig Performance Profiler gathers data about an AutoConfig run and generates a consolidated AutoConfig profile report in HTML format. The report lists all product tops processed by AutoConfig along with the total instantiation and execution time of the templates within them. A beta customer of this feature helped us fix an indexing issue to allow AutoConfig to run in one third of the time.
The generated performance report allows you to drill down on each product top and view the following:
Here's a screenshot of the first few lines of the report:
Premier Support for OC4J 10.1.3.3 ends in July 2009
Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 includes OracleAS 10.1.3 Oracle Containers for J2EE (OC4J) for running its Java-based content. We certified Apps 12 with OracleAS 10.1.3.3 in January 2008 and with OracleAS 10.1.3.4 in December 2008.
You should be aware that the OracleAS 10.1.3.3 grace period will end in July 2009. After July 2009, you will still be able to download existing OracleAS 10.1.3.3 patches, but new patches will be issued only for the latest 10.1.3.4 release.
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