Oracle SOA Suite 11g is the backbone of messaging and application integration in a service oriented architecture. An Application Administrator is responsible for end-to-end administration and management of this infrastructure. The role extends to other areas such as architecting an SOA infrastructure, troubleshooting, monitoring, performance tuning, and securing transactions that flow over loosely coupled components. Understanding the underlying components, services, and configuration and their relation to each other is necessary to effectively administer the Oracle SOA Suite 11g environment. Due to its sheer size, administering Oracle SOA Suite 11g is a daunting task, but this book provides detailed explanations and walkthroughs of all of the core administrative areas.
We begin with an introduction to SOA and quickly move on to management of SOA composite applications. You will learn how to manage composite applications, their deployments, and lifecycles, followed by detailed explanations surrounding monitoring and performance tuning the Oracle SOA Suite 11g infrastructure. In-depth explanations of numerous configuration and administration areas are also covered. You will be taken through troubleshooting approaches on how to identify faults and exceptions through extended logging and thread dumps, finding solutions to common startup problems, and deployment issues. We also explain how to secure the deployed services by leveraging Oracle Web Services Manager. Later chapters deal with managing the metadata services repository, backup, and recovery, and will conclude with advanced topics such as silent installs, cloning, and high availability installations.
Chapter 1, SOA Infrastructure Management: What You Need to Know, introduces Oracle SOA Suite 11g, a complete, best-of-breed, and hot-pluggable product set that helps to deliver robust, agile, and reliable SOA solutions. This chapter introduces the capabilities of Oracle SOA Suite 11g and provides a snapshot of several important aspects surrounding its administration and how it can be leveraged to effectively manage and monitor the SOA infrastructure.
Chapter 2, Management of SOA Composite Applications, focuses on the management of composites, describing composite lifecycles, revisions and states, leveraging ant for automated build and deployments, using configuration plans for code promotion, and defining partitions to logically separate composites. It also describes ways to optimally save instance data, explaining the relation between database usages with respect to various audit levels that can be set.
Chapter 3, Monitoring Oracle SOA Suite 11g, emphasizes monitoring of the service engines and instances, understanding their states as well as obtaining performance metrics of composite instances running on the Oracle SOA Suite 11g infrastructure. This chapter also describes other areas that include a detailed explanation of sensors, ECID, Oracle WebLogic Server infrastructure monitoring, and the break down of the log files in an easy to understand format.
Chapter 4, Tuning Oracle SOA Suite 11g for Optimum Performance, is one of the more important chapters, as it provides guidelines and recommendations on how to drastically improve the performance of your Oracle SOA Suite 11g infrastructure, covering areas of Oracle WebLogic Server, service engines, code considerations, Oracle Database, and operating system tuning recommendations.
Chapter 5, Configuring and Administering Oracle SOA Suite 11g, is quite a long chapter, as it details the numerous administrative areas around BPEL, Mediator, UMS, BAM, and Human Workflow components in varying detail. Other topics such as startup and shutdown of the infrastructure, administration of DVMs and XREFs, configuration of log rotation, setting up UMS, and the creation of read-only MDS accounts for developers are also described.
Chapter 6, Troubleshooting the Oracle SOA Suite 11g Infrastructure, unlike other troubleshooting guides which simply list out solutions to common errors, presents a comprehensive troubleshooting methodology, which, when coupled with the foundational knowledge of the previous chapters, provides you with a better ability to solve most issues related to the infrastructure.
Chapter 7, Configuring Security Policies, introduces Oracle Web Services Manager, a central policy framework for service oriented applications used by Oracle SOA Suite 11g to implement service-level security. This chapter explains the OWSM security semantics such as policy assertions, templates, keystores, and credential stores. It also covers how they can be used to apply security to components within a composite along with the configurations required at the infrastructure. The chapter also covers administration topics that range from logging, exporting, importing, and versioning the various policies by using a combination of WLST and console approaches.
Chapter 8, Managing the Metadata Services Repository and Dehydration Store, discusses operational aspects of the metadata services layer including deploying applications to use an MDS repository, exporting and importing metadata across environments, and database growth management activities, such as tuning and purging. It also discusses partitioning surrounding the Dehydration Store.
Chapter 9, Backup and Recovery, identifies exactly what components need to be backed up (such as the Middleware Home, JDK, Windows registry keys, and runtime artifacts), what would need to be restored in the event of a failure, and to what point in time a recovery would be needed. The chapter provides the necessary approach to recover your environment from the backup point and also explains ways to leverage cloning to backup and restore a middleware installation and domain from one environment to another.
Chapter 10, Advanced Administration Topics, covers several advanced, disjoined topics that most Oracle SOA Suite 11g administrators will be engaged in, namely, patching Oracle SOA Suite components, upgrading from Oracle SOA Suite 10g, installing a highly available clustered setup of the infrastructure, and performing silent installations. You can download this chapter from http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/6082EN_Chapter10_ Advanced Administration Topics.pdf.
This book expects the readers to have a basic knowledge of WebLogic Server, scripting using WLST, and a conceptual understanding of Oracle SOA Suite 11g.
This book is intended for Oracle SOA Suite 11g administrators who have some familiarity with the tool but need detailed explanations and walkthroughs covering all facets of administration. WebLogic Server Administrators, Database Administrators, and even developers looking into entering the world of SOA Suite administration will find this book valuable, as the definitive guide to real world administration of Oracle SOA Suite 11g.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Click on the Browse button and locate your SAR file (for example, C:\svn\SOA11g\HelloWorld\deploy\sca_HelloWorld_rev1.0.jar)."
A block of code is set as follows:
export USERNAME=weblogic export PASSWORD=welcome1 export SOAHOST=soahost1 export SOAPORT=8001
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
export USERNAME=weblogic export PASSWORD=welcome1 export SOAHOST=soahost1 export SOAPORT=8001
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
ant -f ant-sca-mgmt.xml startComposite -Duser=$USERNAME -Dpassword=$PASSWORD -Dhost=$SOAHOST -Dport=$SOAPORT -DcompositeName=HelloWorld -Dpartition=default -Drevision=1.0
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
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