Installation and Configuration Issues and Workarounds

When you perform a combined (Studio and Deployer) installation of Oracle Virtual Assembly, and subsequently configure the Deployer in an Oracle WebLogic Server domain, the installation creates an ab_instance directory under the Oracle WebLogic Server domain root ("Deployer instance directory"). This ab_instance will not be functional for the purposes of using abctl.

Instead, in the case of a combined installation you should only use the "Studio Instance directory" that is created by the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder installer (typically located directly under MIDDLEWARE_HOME).

A Deployer instance directory is only suitable for use in a Deployer-only installation.

When installing Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder on an Oracle Exalogic machine with a large disk space, a known issue with the Oracle Universal Installer prevents the installation from completing. You can see an error that includes "errorString:Space required for Oracle home is 350 MB.[[ Space Available: 0 MB ]."

The workaround is to launch the installer as follows:

./runInstaller -novalidation -ignoreDiskWarning

If certain libraries are missing from the VM, an exception may be recorded in the logs on the VM. The exception is the result of a file copy, and is harmless. The file is still successfully copied. The exception appears similar to the following:

[2012-04-25T03:04:04.949-04:00] [as] [TRACE] [] 
[oracle.as.assemblybuilder.common] [tid: 11] [SRC_CLASS: 
oracle.as.assemblybuilder.common.jni.Native] [SRC_METHOD: <init>] Unable to load native library. 

The base images used in creating the VMs has an incorrect sshd_config file. The line

#AllowTcpForwarding yes 

is commented out and should read:

AllowTcpForwarding yes 

To allow remote introspection, you must update the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file on the VMs and restart SSH (/etc/rc.d/init.d/sshd stop/start).

After upgrading Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder, you may see exceptions in the Message.log after launching Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio for the first time. These exceptions can be ignored.

Workaround

If you reopen Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio, you no longer see the exceptions.

The Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio installer ("runInstaller") may fail on large disks. The failure appears as an error message in the wizard erroneously stating that there is not enough disk space together with error messages on the console from which the installer was launched.

To work around this issue, install a 64-bit Oracle HotSpot Java JDK6 or JRE6 on the host where the installation will occur. Then explicitly specify the path to the JRE using the -jreLoc command line argument, for example:

% runInstaller -jreLoc <path-to-jre> 

Note that Java 7 is not supported in this release of Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder.