This section describes general issues and workarounds for Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio operations, such as introspection, capturing file sets, and deployment. It includes these items:
This section describes issues observed during introspection. It includes these items:
The remoteUser specified for remote WLS introspection must be either the owner of the WLS process that is running on the reference system, or must be a user that has permission to read files that the owner of the WLS process creates.
You can create secure connections to multiple OVMs using Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio. However, you cannot create secure connections to multiple OVMs during a single Studio session. In order to create multiple secure connections, you must create a secure connection, then exit Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio. Restart Studio and create the next secure OVM connection. You must repeat this process for each desired secure OVM connection.
Do not attempt to import and register a template at the same time. Doing so will cause the registration to fail and may cause unforeseen side-effects.
It is possible to have a time zone in your base image that is significantly different from the time zone of a reference system being introspected. If the introspected reference system is an Oracle WebLogic Server installation that has demo SSL certificates that were recently created you can experience a deployment failure caused by invalid SSL certificates. This is due to the valid time listed in the certificate being in the future relative to the time in the base image. Make sure the time zone in your base image matches the time zone of your reference systems to avoid this type of failure.
This section describes issues observed during file set capture operations. It includes these items:
If you receive an error while registering a template (such as ImportError, or any error including oracle.ovs.biz.exception.OVSException) in the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder log file, be sure to check the Oracle VM logs for the root cause, as it may not be expressed in the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder logs.
When capturing file sets on a local reference system that was installed using a different OS userid than the one used for the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder installation, capturing file sets will fail with file permission errors. There are two workarounds for this issue. Use either:
Run Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder as root. When you do this, all generated artifacts in catalog (such as metadata, file sets, and others) are owned by the root user and all subsequent operations must also be executed as root user.
Run local file set capture through remote ssh. Treat the local reference system as remote and perform remote file set capture, using an ssh user that has read permission of the reference system installation.
An intermittent problem has been reported in which the status of a template is not immediately updated after the status has changed. If you encounter this issue, stop and restart Oracle Assembly Builder Studio.
During introspection, you may receive a full disk error even though you have the required disk space available. You encounter this issue if you have specified an Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder instance that is located within a Fusion Middleware instance home. To correct the problem, move your Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder instance directory outside of the Fusion Middleware instance home.
During introspection, if there are files owned by root in a directory such as ORACLE_HOME, a non-root user is prevented from capturing the file sets in the ORACLE_HOME as part of the introspection.
The solution is to remove these files, or have their ownership changed to the user that is capturing the file sets.
This section describes issues observed during deployment. It includes these items:
Scale operations are affected by failed deployments.
Scale down operations only remove properly (successfully) deployed instances. In the case of failed deployments, those instances are not removed during scale down. Failed instances are left for you to troubleshoot. If you want to remove instances that failed to deploy, you must undeploy them, fix the plan, and then redeploy.
Scale up operations are prohibited if a failed instance exists in the assembly. As above, you must undeploy, fix the problem, and then redeploy.
When importing an assembly or assembly archive (OVA file) using the 'importAs' option, the deployment plans are imported, but any overrides that were in the original deployment plan are not imported. It will appear as if you have a new deployment plan with no overridden properties.
Deployment attempts will fail if IP addresses specified in the deployment plan are unresolved on the Oracle Virtual Assembly machine (the machine on which Deployer is running). To avoid this issue, ensure that IP addresses are resolvable.
If you have created deployment plans for an assembly, and then made certain modifications to the assembly (notably, adding or removing network interfaces from one of the assembly's appliances), then deployment plan values may become misassigned. (For example, the IP address and netmask for a deleted network interface may be assigned to a different network interface).
To avoid this, it is recommended that you create and populate deployment plans only after you have completed all desired editing operations on the assembly. The safest approach is to create an assembly archive first, then create deployment plans. This is because creating the assembly archive prevents further edit operations that may invalidate the deployment plan.
Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder does not support NFS mounting in the reference system, since these NFS mounts will not be created by Assembly Builder in the deployment environment. In some cases, deployment will fail if the reference system has an NFS mount.
A number of third-party tools require mounting file systems as part of their configuration. This can require specific workarounds. For example, when using the Websphere MessageQueue external JMS server, you may encounter the following issues:
The configuration for the JMS Server requires access to a class provided by Websphere. In some environments, those classes (also known as jars) are added to the PRE_CLASSPATH environment variable prior to starting Oracle WebLogic Server. Ensure that the configuration for your environment does not require modification for Oracle WebLogic Server to be able to see these jar files automatically on startup.
The Oracle WebLogic Server configuration for the JMS server requires a JNDI connection URL as follows, 'file://<path to mq config>'. This file resides on the external Websphere server, and must be mounted locally so it can be used.
To allow template registration, the Oracle VM host must be able to download the template through HTTP from the Assembly Builder host. If you are using a firewall (for example, iptables on Linux) then you must properly configure that firewall to allow the communication. By default Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder specifies its HTTP port to be "0" which causes the system to issue one (so there is no default port).
You can specify the port by setting the "ovmPort" property in deployer.properties.
A simpler solution is to turn off the firewall. For iptables, use the following command: /etc/init.d/iptables stop
To configure your firewall, refer to the documentation for your firewall.
Whenever an unexpected error occurs during deployment, you typically want to examine what went wrong and perform necessary cleanup before recovering from the error. For these reasons, Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder provides neither an automatic recovery mechanism, nor a tool to recover from a failure.
To perform recovery of the Deployer:
Examine the resource pools in the corresponding Oracle Virtual Machine managers configured in the resource-pools.xml file relevant to the crashed AB_INSTANCE and perform cleanup. This includes cleaning up (stopping and destroying) all instances initiated by Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder.
Delete the .hastore file.
This returns the Deployer to a clean state.
Some components may require a large number of open files to deploy successfully. Even if a base image with the required limits is provided, the limit will be reset to 4096 by the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder service that runs on the VM.
The workaround is to edit $ORACLE_HOME/resources/bottler/ab/etc/ab_service.sh to set the desired limit instead of 4096, and then to create (or recreate) the assembly archive.
In an Oracle Exalogic deployment, using the deployment plan to override a MAC address for an appliances network interface does not actually take effect on the appliance. The deployment succeeds, but the appliance uses a different MAC address, allocated from IaaS.
You should avoid setting the interface MAC address property in your deployment plan to a custom MAC address.
This section describes other issues observed while performing operations in Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder. It includes these items:
Add DNS Button Does Not Work When Using OVAB Studio in Japanese Language
Large Delete Operations Can Make Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio Appear to Lock Up
Zero-count Appliances Cannot Be Scaled in Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio
Password Field Is Not Editable When Configuring a New Domain
When following the procedure to create resource pools using the graphical interface of Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio set to the Japanese locale, the Add DNS button does not function. To work around this problem, set the locale to English:
Exit Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder
Execute the commands:
export LC_ALL= c ./abstudio.sh
Create resource pool connection in the English locale.
When large top-level items are deleted through Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio, the interface may appear to have locked-up, when in fact it is running normally. This is normal behavior, allow the application to finish its task.
Ensure your virtual machines have at least 500MB of available swap space (on each machine).
Messages displayed during top-level delete of items are displayed in English only.
In an export operation, the AB_INSTANCE/tmp directory is used for storage of intermediary artifacts. This means that an export may fail if there is not enough space in the disk where AB_INSTANCE is located, even though the destination directory may be located in another disk.
It is possible to create networks in Oracle VM 3.0 that have the period ('.') character in the name. But Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder does not support this character in the name so you will not be able to name your Vnet in Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder after the actual network name in your Oracle VM 3.0 environment.
The createAssembly command in the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder abctl command-line interface fails to disallow a Vnet name containing the '.' character. The Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio graphical user interface correctly disallows it.
In a Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio or combined (Studio and Deployer) installation, downloading an assembly archive from the Deployer or from the EM Software Library automatically imports the archive into the local catalog. If you optionally specify a new name for the assembly when downloading, then the archive file will be saved on disk using the new name, and imported into the catalog using the new name. However, the contents inside the archive will still refer to the original assembly name, and hence this downloaded archive should be considered obsolete.
Therefore, after a successful download and import, the downloaded archive should not be used. It can be deleted manually from AB_INSTANCE/archives, or it can be overwritten by using the createAssemblyArchive command with the -force option, or the create template wizard in the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio graphical user interface (which implicitly uses the -force option).
If you deploy an assembly that contains a 'zero-count' appliance - that is, an appliance with its scaling minimum and initial target both set to 0 - you will not be able to scale that appliance up using the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio graphical user interface. Use the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder command-line interface scale command instead. If the describeScalingGroups command does not show the group you want to scale, use the appliance id, which can be found in the 'Appliances' column of the describeAssemblyInstances output.
Platform: Linux
On Linux systems, when creating a new domain in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Configuration Wizard, the Password and Confirm Password fields are sometimes not editable, and you cannot enter a password to create a domain.
Workaround
There are two ways to work around this issue:
To work around the issue each time it happens, click the Close Window X button in the upper right corner of the Configuration Wizard. In the confirmation dialog that appears, click No to return to the Configuration Wizard. You can then enter and confirm the password for the domain.
To fix this issue permanently:
Kill all scim processes. For example:
kill `pgrep scim`
Modify (or create) the file ~/.scim/config to include the following line (case-sensitive):
/FrontEnd/X11/Dynamic = true
If you are running VNC, restart the VNC server.
Run the Configuration Wizard again.