Andreas' Adventures

Just my luck: Friday afternoon and I hit an error in the Oracle VM. OVMRU_001020E does not show on Google or inside Oracle Support ;-) Am I really the first to hit that problem? Seems to be an issue with the network cards in my virtual machine. I guess I will do some more reading before I can continue installing my virtual machines. Update: Solved it. In the view I went to the Network Ports and selected additional ports, added them to the machine and off we go.

Interesting issue in a SOA/BPM today. Redeployment of the application (SOA) and restart went through without an issue. However the stresstest came back almost immediately. The AdminServer.out showed the error "A call to flushChanges on the current MDSSession does not specify the correct transaction key". Even more astonishing was the error TNS-12516 when trying to connect to the database. After a little bit of searching we found that the database alert log said it could not extend the SOA_INFRA tablespace. Adapted this and everything went back to normal.

I bounced into the problem of getting the dreaded OVMAPI_4010e error when I was discovering the Oracle VM server in my network. Metalink (MyOracleSupport for the younger ones) told me that this was typically an issue with the password of the OVM Agent. One obscure internet blog told me however that this was due to the difference in versions. Now - it beats me how the connection information and credentials are passed differently when a new version arrives, but eventually I placed the same version of the OVM Manager as the OVM Server on my Virualbox image and it works.

Obviously I do not run a major Oracle-based OVM data center. So for real-life large enterprises this is not an issue. However image the following: you have a machine on which you want to run Oracle VM Server. Installation of the OVM is straightforward and pretty easy. Now you end up with a piece of equipment that does exactly NOTHING. Nothing? Yup. Well you can start it and you get a Linux prompt, and that is pretty much it. In comes the Oracle VM Manager. It dances, it talks, it does the wash and it walks the dog - and it can be yours for 99.99$ ;-) Seriously, in order to get anything useful to be done with the OVM Server you need the manager. Now there is a small design flaw. Setting up the OVM Manager requires an extra machine. This can be a Virtualbox image, another machine in your network or even a guest on your Oracle VM Server. Now the last seems to be appealing. Normally in such an environment I would like to have the controlling software on the box that I control ...

Ok - when you do things the first time you make mistakes. This was my first server I've ever build from scratch. I fiddled around with some equipment before, but buying a number of components and installing them was new for me. Now the motherboard I have does have no video card as the folks who typically buy these extreme motherboards do bring their own video cards with them to render the monsters they are about to slay. With me things were not so bright. Although I also bought a nice 24' screen I was still seeing nothing - basically because there was nothing to plug it in to the server. Well - another trip to the store to buy a simple video card. I did however initially bought a wireless card for the machine as I intend to place the machine in my study room. Historically this is where my DSL connection ended, so there was always a router with a cable present. To my surprise I could not install the Oracle VM Server without a network. Obviously this makes sense when yo...

So - I bought a decently sized system to have my own private cloud on it. The main motivation was the fact that currently it has become pretty difficult to run some Oracle software on your laptop. Although a number of people do this you quickly realize that they just have a simple database installation on it or a plain WebLogic Server. While this is satisfactory for a number of purposes it doesn't come near the things that I encounter in my day to day life. My customers typically have HA or even MAA environments, using RAC and some of the newest Fusion Middleware components. When you simply want to re-enact an environment of that size your laptop will not be sufficient. So - this journey is about the setup and "cloudy" ideas I have. So what I have now is a system that offers me a good CPU, 64 GB of memory (probably the most expensive part nowadays) and 3 TB disk plus 512 SSD. All in all it cost me around 1800 Euro's. And as it was bought by my company the Du...