I ran across this announcement on Oracle’s blogs about the new PeopleTools 8.54 OVM Template. The problem is that I don’t have Oracle VM and don’t really want to delve into messing with it at the moment. Virtualbox works better for my playing around. It turns out that it wasn’t too hard to get this running in Virtualbox.
So, here are my notes…
To start, I downloaded the machine. It came in 4 zip files (OVM_EL5U8_X86_64_EXALOGIC_TOOLS8_54_01_PVM_1of4.zip).
After they were downloaded, I unzipped them. That gave me 4 tar files (OVM_EL5U8_X86_64_EXALOGIC_TOOLS8_54_01_PVM.tgz1of4) and a readme.txt.
Next, I used the “cat” command to piece together the 4 files into a single tar archive, and then the “tar” command to uncompress it. Here is the full command:
cat *.tgz*of4 | tar xz
At the end, I ended up with…
- config.img (24.7 Mb)
- System.img (17.6 Gb)
- TOOLS.img (17.8 Gb)
- vm.cfg
The “img” files are the virtual hard drivers. The problem is that Oracle VM uses the img format and Virtualbox needs either a vmdk or a vdi format. With the help of WebUpd8, I converted the System.img to a vdi file:
VBoxManage convertdd System.img System.vdi
Now, I need to create the machine itself. I didn’t see any easy way to convert the “vm.cfg” file into a Virtualbox machine configuration, and I am not really sure that it is worth the effort. You can open the vm.cfg file in a text editor to see the settings.
I created a new machine. The OS is Oracle Linux. I knew it was 64-bit because PeopleTools requires 64-bit.
Looking in the vm.cfg file, I found that the memory was set to 4G. I probably could have changed that to a different number, but I didn’t want to try.
When creating the machine, you can only add a single hard drive. I started with the System drive because it is the first in the list in the configuration. I clicked on the little folder icon to select the existing drive file.
The was the last step in creating the machine. Next, I edited the settings of the machine and added the other two drives.
Finally, it booted and I was able to log into it:
User and password info from readme:
The following local user / passwords are contained within the template:
– psadm1 / 0radmin account that owns the installed software.
This is the installation administrator.
– psadm2 / 0radmin account that creates and runs AppBatch domains.
This is the domain administrator.
– root / ovsroot Default root account for OVM templates
So, this turned out fairly simple. You could probably do something very similar to convert it to VMWare.
Excellent DIY – thanks for posting.
Nice one.
That said, I’m not aware of any valuable conversion for the move to VMWare (ESXi). But I’m listening if there’s suggestion.
Nicolas.
I was actually thinking more about VMWare player than ESXi. That being said, I have worked with someone who has a number of PS installs on ESXi used for experimenting across many different versions and applications. If they were to use the image, they would want it in ESXi just to keep things the same.
When it booted did it go through an initialization phase where it runs the OVM tempalte scripts? I did something similar a couple of years ago and had to mock up some of the script files for OVM template initialization. I must have taken a much harder route because I copied files out of the .img’s rather than converting them.
The OVM templates usually have an app tier and a db tier. What did you use for your db tier?
I just got it to boot. I had thoughts of trying to install the DB into the same image. That would make it kind of like a jump start to building an install from scratch. I never got the time and it wasn’t really worth the effort.