How to Provision Weblogic in 15 minutes

image from oracle blog

Back in 2014 when I was still a Consultant, at one of my customers (a Telco company in Finland) it took me around 6 weeks to get test and production Weblogic environments to deploy the application (Tibco MDM).

–    Meeting with Infra team to discuss hardware specs (1 hour)

–    Procurement process (4 weeks)

–    Meeting with dedicated Offshore team responsible for WLS
installation (1 hour)

–   Configuration of  WLS domain and other specs (1 week)  

Nowadays, once we have agreed on hardware and WLS domain specs, we can provision a full Environment  in less than 15 minutes 🙂 That is fantastic.

The entire offering is available in the OCI Marketplace:

 There are 3 WLS Editions available:

  • Oracle WebLogic Server Standard Edition
  • Oracle WebLogic Server Enterprise Edition – includes clustering
  • Oracle WebLogic Suite – includes Oracle Coherence for increased performance and scalability, and Active Gridlink for RAC for advanced database connectivity

With 2 different deployment models:

  • WLS on OCI (VM)
  • WLS on OKE (Kubernetes)

And 2 licensing models:

  • BYOL – for customers with on premise licenses
  • UCM – for new customers

You can find two detailed tutorials:

In this post I will install a single node WLS EE, without a database -> this is the most simple deployment. Yes, I could also use the Standard edition for this.

Once you choose the Application, you get the bellow screen, where you have plenty of information on the following steps.

 The most relevant choice at this time is the Version you wish to install.

 

 Once you press Create Stack, the main configuration wizard appears, and here is where you will define all the parameters for this deployment.

 Resource Name Prefix: This will be your domain name

Weblogic Server Shape: Choose the shape of your VM/BM

SSH key: the public key so that you can SSH into the machine later on

Weblogic Server count: The number of managed servers in the
domain.

Weblogic admin user name: admin user for the console login

Weblogic admin password: Here you pass the ocid reference to
the actual password stored in the Vault. Check the tutorial for all the details on this.

I choose the option “Create new VCN” – no need to worry about having a properly configured VCN upfront. You could also choose to provision a
Load Balancer, but in this case with only 1 node, doesn’t matter.

I have no DB and this is not a JRF domain.

Finally we see the review page before creating the stack.

The stack executes the terraform script with all the variables we provided, and all going well it will succeed 😊

 Please note the execution time – around 6 minutes! For comparison, I have also provisioned a cluster with 3 managed servers and it took around 10 minutes. In the compute instances page we can find all the details for our machine including the public ip for accessing the admin
console.

https://<publicIP>:7002/console

15 minutes in order to provision a WLS server. Not to mention that we can scale vertically and horizontally with the same flexibility. You can also reuse the Stack that provisioned this server – which makes it extremely easy to spin up/down servers.