Specifications

VMware and BEA WebLogic Solutions Deployment Guide
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1.6 Deployment Approach Summary
The deployment approach for implementing a BEA WebLogic Application server environment on VMware
infrastructure has been summarized in the following steps.
1. Install and configure your VMware Infrastructure 3 environment including ESX Server,
VirtualCenter and VMware Infrastructure client to manage ESX Server hosts.
2. Create a virtual machine and install all the BEA WebLogic Server components that should
be part of a base image.
- The base image could contain the BEA WebLogic software and node manager
installed as a windows service.
- Install any additional software (IT tools, anti-virus, management agents etc.) that
need to be part of the base virtual machine image.
3. Create a VM template from the base virtual machine. This template will be used to
provision BEA WebLogic application server nodes.
- This template will act as the standard template for deployment across your BEA
WebLogic environment
- You can create additional templates if desired so you have multiple standard
images for different layers and applications of the BEA environment.
4. Create BEA WLS nodes (Admin server, HTTP proxy, Managed servers etc.) from the
template and perform OS and application customization specific to your BEA environment.
Configure the customized load balanced BEA Domain.
- OS customization would include changes to Windows SID, network configuration,
hostname, license keys etc.
- Application customization would include configuring the different WLS nodes that
are part of a BEA domain environment.
- You can consider building customization scripts that can be invoked as part of
the cloning process.
5. If you would like to upgrade or patch your BEA WLS environment, consider using
- Snapshots while directly upgrading production BEA WLS nodes. This will ensure
prompt rollback to stable state in case of upgrade issues.
- “VM Cloning” to create a clone of production BEA WLS nodes and migrate it to a
test or development environment.
 Create a private network or add your cloned VM to another network
(test or development) that does not see the production VM so you can
retain the same network attributes of the production VM.
 Apply all upgrades and patches, test and validate functionality
 Migrate the upgraded clone into production VM by just moving the VM
network back to the production and taking your existing production VM
out of network.
6. If you already have existing BEA WLS environment on a physical system, use VMware
P2V Assistant (P2V) to migrate the physical BEA WLS nodes to virtual machines. This will
help consolidate the physical BEA WLS nodes on ESX Server(s), while retaining the
integrity and validity of the configurations in your BEA environment.
- Build a target virtual machine and create the target virtual disk
- Recommended to create the target virtual disk to be of the same size as the
source disk.
- Install P2V on another VM (called helper VM) which has the same OS as the
source (physical) system.
- Attach the target disk created to the helper VM
- Boot source system using P2V boot disk
- Clone the source disk(s) to the target disk(s) using P2V
- Reconfigure target virtual disk to make it bootable.
- Detach the target virtual disk from helper VM
- Boot the target virtual machine from the target virtual disk to bring up the virtual
machine BEA WLS node.