BPEL installations involve several pieces of software. For a basic single node installation, there are four components. The first one is the dehydration database that persists the BPEL metadata and the BPEL instance information, including instances that are currently being executed ("in-flight" instances). The second component is the application server that provides the platform for BPEL. BPEL is supported on Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Application Server, IBM WebSphere, and JBoss. The application server consists of various components such as a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and a web server. The latest certification of application server platform listing can be found here:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/ias/files/oracle_soa_certification_101310.html.
The third component is the BPEL PM server itself, which is fundamentally a Java application. This application is packaged with the Oracle Application Server as part of the SOA Suite...