Longer Means Longer

No matter what your religion is and what methodology you practice, this sentence is true for ever “longer means more time than normal” :)
I would like to dedicate this particular phrase to “Oracle SOA Suite” installation process on two different OS platforms. It sounds sophisticated, but who cares, dedication is still dedication.

I heard about a new SOA Suite 11.1.1.5 release of a version previously, and moreover, I had to check one issue with the Oracle Human Workflow engine (the SOA Suite component). So, the time for a new (renew) SOA installation has come :)

This time, as usual, I have started from making/copying the OS background. Here I don't have a full stop thinking process. The answer is rather standard: “VirtualBox+Ubuntu”.

There are many references “how to install particular SOA Suite on a particular platform”, so it is easy to find it on the Internet (BTW, it is a good practice to have the installation guide, or some white-paper called “step-by-step” that helps to avoid stupid mistakes).
Nevertheless, an interesting part of this story has begun at a place where I have never thought before it could, or more precisely, with installation of “Oracle XE DB Universe” (BTW, the recommended DB version for small deployment instances). It took me (as never before) an hour to make it stable. I will repeat that sentence: “the whole long hour”, and only after that I was able to move to the main SOA Suite installation steps (WebLogic, RCU, etc.) An interesting (thriller) story continues. After those SOA installation steps, my virtualbox has started to throw errors suddenly “Read-only file system”.

I have spent the next hour with this unstable virtualbox (it had the virtual disk error, etc.). Anyway, the result is that I have decided to give up and to switch to an old package of mine which is still worth trying to use when I get nervous: “Vmware Player and Windows 2003 Server”.

Oh yes, .... Windows :)

And then, based on Oracle recommended “Quick Start Guide for SOA Suite”, I took a very quick tour with SOA installation on Windows. It went without a single error, and it took me … not more that an hour.

Resume (2h>1h)
Longer means longer, no matter what your OS religion is :) When time is an issue, there is no time for religion :)

So, the very last recommendation:
“When you have to install some proof of concept platform for just one test and you are not sure about the installation process, make use of Windows OS. It has more users so it should be tested widely. Shorter means shorter, popular solutions has more testers :)”

And what about production environment?
Hmmm, the answer is simple: "it depends" or in other words: "make a new decision" ;)