There’s currently a lot of interest in moving virtualized environments to Oracle’s engineered systems.  This is partly because they are good systems and, for organizations that can use their capabilities, provide good value for money and high performance. Partly because Oracle licensing makes it tough to virtualize cost-effectively on other platforms (looking at you, VMware). And partly because Oracle sales people are extremely motivated to sell hardware along with software.

Unfortunately, though, there is still a lot of confusion about how this might impact deployment of WebCenter on these engineered systems.  Here are a few scenarios you may come across and how to deal with them.

• Exadata (or Database Appliance) – no impact at all from an installation point of view.  The database is still just a database from the application’s point of view and will continue to connect via jdbc.
• Exalogic with native OEL – this is a rare configuration, but Exalogic does support install of OEL natively on compute nodes.  In this case there is no difference to installing on any other Linux OS.  Assume (and ensure) networking is handled by the Exalogic administrator because that is where the issues may arise.
• Exalogic with virtualized compute nodes – the most common deployment.  Thestandard/supported approach is to install all the WebCenter components on virtual OEL servers as usual.  Installation of WebLogic and WebCenter on Elastic Cloud (Exalogic) is exactly the same as on a regular server. Networking can be challenging when configuring virtual environments on Exalogic, so be sure that is all worked out ahead of time. Domain configuration and data stores should be on the ZFS storage appliance.

A major value add for Exalogic is the optimization for WebLogic that is designed into the system.  All of these optimizations have to be configured on a domain or server basis, though, they are not OOTB. This is a good resource for working through the optimizations.