Blogs

Taking E-Business Suite R12.2.9 to the Cloud

The time to look at migrating your E-Business Suite installation to the cloud is now. EBS 12.1 will be out of support by the end of 2021 and businesses are looking for new solutions. Oracle has made it easy to take a test drive of R12.2.9 with its Vision demo. One option is to download the demo and install, import and configure it on a VirtualBox. This option would take about one day. Even faster though is to configure R12.2.9 on Oracle Cloud – this can be achieved in only one HOUR.

This speedy alternative offered by Oracle will allow you to not only test drive 12.2.9 but also provide you with hands-on experience with EBS on Oracle Cloud.  Technically, in one hour, you will be all set with Oracle EBS R12.2.9. https://www.oracle.com/ca-en/cloud/free/

Everything should start with a subscription to a free cloud account.
It takes 15 minutes and a credit card to get to Oracle Cloud.
Do not worry, Oracle uses the credit card as proof that you’re are a person. Oracle will send you the Tenancy link with a password to access your cloud. Since the move to the Cloud became so popular, Oracle Corporation made available for test a very long list of products.

The EBS Vision Demo on Cloud is at:
https://blogs.oracle.com/ebsandoraclecloud/ebs-1229-demo-install-image-now-available

After registration and access testing you have to complete the following steps to get you running EBS on the cloud:

1. SSH keys generation
2. VM Instance creation
3. Accessing the EBS Vision instance from the command line
4. Setup the Access port for the Cloud instance
5. Configure the client machine for EBS access
6. Application startup

 

1) SSH keys generation:

• Download Putty,  MobaXterm or any other emulator.
• You need an SSH key to connect to the cloud.
• To generate the key issue: ssh-keygen -t rsa
• After opening a terminal
  • Enter file in which to save the key (/home/oracle/.ssh/id_rsa):
  • Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):    leave it empty

Do not forget to issue the command on the private key.

$ chmod 400 id_rsa

No one else can access it.

 

2) VM Instance creation

• Time to connect to your tenancy and create a VM instance
• Click on Create VM Instance or on the Dashboard and click on Compute –Instances:
• Provide a name for the VM Instance.

• Choose the image source for your instance.
• Click on Change Image and select “Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.9 Demo Image”

• Click on “Show Shape, Network” and Choose “VM.Standard E2.2”.
• This is the recommended shape for EBS R12.2 by providing 2 OCPU and 30 GB of memory and 2Gb of Bandwidth

• If this is a newly created account and you have not created a VCN before, a new VCN is created automatically.
• Select the option “Assign a public IP address” so that a public IP is allocated to the EBS VM Instance to be accessible through the internet.
• You will be requested to paste the SSH keys, generated previously.

• Choose to Create to provision the VM instance and the status will change from “Provisioning” to  “Running” within a few minutes.

 

3) Accessing the EBS Vision instance from the command line

• From the Instance details page copy, the Public IP Address (140.xxx.xxx.xxx) open an SSH session to connect to the instance. If connecting to the instance using MobaXterm, change to the directory where the private and public keys are located.
• Execute the command: ssh -I id_rsa_name opc@140.xxx.xxx.xxx; save the session as EBS-1229.
• Once connected, sudo root (sudo su -) and configure the hostname.
• The commands are straightforward:

hostname
ls /u01/install/APPS
./u01/install/APPS/updatehosts.sh
hostname
hostname apps.example.com

(apps.example.com being the hostname name with domain name)

3-1 Starting up the EBS Vision Demo

While connected as the oracle user change directory to /u01/install/APPS/scripts
to start the database and applications:   sh startdb.sh
cd  /u01/install/APPS   and setup Application environment  (see below):

The Sysadmin has to have its password set:

sh /u01/install/APPS/scripts/enableSysAdmin.sh

You can do the same with the demo users:

sh   /u01/install/APPS/scripts/enableDemo.sh

 

4) Setup the Access port for the Cloud instance.

This EBS Vision Demo will be accessed from the internet and we have to do a final step to allow a specific port to be opened in the cloud firewall. You may use an IPSEC or FastConnect based VPN to limit client access.

Usually, the port is 8000.
Complete the following steps to open this port:
We have to configure an Ingress rule for this port to be open to the users.

From the compute instance, locate the VCN (virtual cloud network)

Navigate to Networking — Virtual Cloud Networks — Click on VCN — click Security Lists — Add Ingress Rules — Provide CIDR, Port 8000

• Add an ingress rule that permits incoming connections from any source IP (0.0.0.0/0) to enter 8000 as the destination port.

 

5) Configure the client machine for EBS access

To access your Demo from your laptop, you will have to complete a final step:

Update the local host’s file on Windows

• Navigate to the following directory: C:\\Windows\System32\drivers\etc

Edit the host’s file.

• Add the IP address and hostname of your instance:

140.xxx.xxx.xxx apps.example.com   apps

 

6) Application startup:

Start the Services now using Oracle provided scripts, startdb.sh and startapps.sh. I have also run the SYSADMIN.sh script to enable and reset the SYSADMIN user.

You are all set:

You can now access the applications using
https://<hostname>:8000/OA_HTML/AppsLogin.

http://apps.example.com:8000/OA_HTML/AppsLogin

With only these 6 simple steps you are now cloud-ready (hopefully in under an hour)!

More from this Author