R12 BASICS ========== What is Oracle Applications/Oracle e-Business Suite ??

To facilitate big businesses, Oracle Corporation have created collection of software in the category of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) known as modules, that are integrated to talk to each other and known as Oracle Applications or E-Business Suite. Eg. Oracle Inventory deals with the items you maintain in stock, warehouse etc. Oracle Receivables and Oracle Order Management are dealing with customers like orders given by Customers and Money collected from customers. Oracle General Ledger receives information from all the different transaction modules and summarizes them in order to create profit and loss statements, reports for paying Taxes etc. Oracle Cost Management helps to maintain the costs of items in your inventory and the immediate modules that it interacts with are Oracle Inventory, Oracle Bills of Material, Order Management.

Oracle Applications Previous Releases

10.7 : Oldest Release of Oracle ERP which is character, thin client based. Oracle has stopped support for this release from year 1998. 11 : 11i : R12 : Latest Release by Oracle In the chain of Oracle ERP Releases.

Whats new in Oracle Apps R12

Oracle Applications Release 12 is the latest release in the chain of E-Business Suite Releases by Oracle. This is a step towards Oracle Fusion as this uses Oracle Fusion Middleware applications in its base e.g. Oracle application Server 10g, Oracle BI Discoverer 10g etc. This release came up with the new file system model i.e. segregation of Code, Data and Configurations to have easy maintenance and to avert NFS mount issues on shared Application tier configuration systems. Also Autoconfig will not write anything in APPL_TOP, COMMON_TOP area in R12. All instance specific configurations, log files are written in INST_TOP area. Instance Home provides the ability to share Applications and technology stack code among multiple instances.

The major changes in this release are : On Middle Tier

Application Server version 1.0.2.2.2 is changed by 10g Application Server i.e. 10.1.3.X mod_jserv is replaced by mod_oc4j Apache which is part of Application Server mentioned above is changed from version 1.3.19 to 1.3.34 Long running Forms & Reports Version 6i (8.0.6) are replaced by Forms & Reports Version 10g i.e. 10.1.2.X Java/ JDK version 1.3.X or 1.4.X will be replaced by JDK 1.5.X

On File System

There are three ORACLE_HOME, one for Web Server another for Forms & Reports and third for Database with the upgraded versions i.e.10g AS for Web Server, 10g AS for forms & reports , 10g R2 for database A new top INSTANCE_TOP is introduced in Release 12 for configuration and log files along with the other TOP's in existing in 11i.

Oracle Apps R12 Architecture

R12 file system has come up with new model - Code, Data, Configurations are segregated nicely to have easy maintenance, to avert NFS mount issues on shared appl tier configuration systems. Auto-config will not write anything in APPL_TOP, COMMON_TOP area in R12. All instance specific configurations, log files are written in INST_TOP area. Instance Home provides the ability to share Applications and technology stack code among multiple instances In Release 12, the application tier contains Oracle Application Server 10g (OAS10g). Three servers or service groups comprise the basic application tier for Oracle Applications:

Web services

The Web services component of Oracle Application Server processes requests received over the network from the desktop clients.

Forms services

Forms services in Oracle Applications Release 12 are provided by the Forms listener servlet or Form Socket mode, which facilitates the use of firewalls, load balancing, proxies, and other networking options.

Concurrent Processing server

Processes that run on the Concurrent Processing server are called concurrent requests. When you submit such a request, either through HTML-based or Forms-based Applications, a row is inserted into a database table specifying the program to be run. A concurrent manager then reads the applicable requests in the table, and starts the associated concurrent program. Note: There is no concept of an Administration server in Release 12. By default, patching can be undertaken from any application tier node. Techstack Components: DB_TIER

10.2.0.2 RDBMS ORACLE_HOME

APPL-TIER

10.1.2 C ORACLE_HOME / FORMS ORACLE_HOME (8.0.6 ORACLE HOME equivalence) 10.1.3 Java ORACLE_HOME/OC4J ORACLE_HOME (iAS ORACLE_HOME equivalence) INSTANCE_TOP : Each application tier has a unique Instance Home file system associated

R12 E-Biz and Application Server 10g There are two versions of Oracle Application server 10g (oAS10g) used,

The Oracle Application Server 10.1.2 ORACLE_HOME (sometimes referred to as the Tools, C, or Developer ORACLE_HOME) replaces the 8.0.6 ORACLE_HOME provided by Oracle9i Application Server 1.0.2.2.2 in Release 11i. The Oracle Application Server 10.1.3 ORACLE_HOME (sometimes referred to as the Web or Java ORACLE_HOME) replaces the 8.1.7-based ORACLE_HOME provided by Oracle9i Application Server 1.0.2.2.2 in Release 11i.

Hence to take advantage of latest oc4j code 10.1.3 AS got introduced. But to support ebiz forms applications 10.1.2 AS introduced.

R12 e-Biz Oracle Homes R12 E-Biz Directory Structure Below Image describes the complete directory structure for complete e-biz installation i.e. DB_TOP, APPL_TOP and new INST_TOP. If you dig into the INST_TOP you will find that it only contains all the configuration files, start-stop scripts, log files, certificate files, pid files etc.., so as to make DB_TOP and APPL_TOP untouched for any instance specific changes. So you can also make DB_TOP and APPL_TOP read only.

INSTANCE TOP Instance home is the top-level directory for an Applications Instance which is known as Instance Home and is denoted the environment variable $INST_TOP. This contains all the config files, log files, SSL certificates etc. Advantages of new INSTANCE HOME

The additional Instance Home makes the middle tier more easy to manage and organized since the data is kept separate from the config files. The Instance Home also has the ability to share the Applications and Technology stack code across multiple instances. Another advantage of the Instance Home is that the Autoconfig writes only in INST_TOP so APPL_TOP and ORACLE_HOME can also be made read only file system if required. To create a new instance that shares an existing middle-tier, just create a new instance_top with proper config files and NFS Mount the middle tier in the

INSTANCE TOP - STRUCTURE $INST_TOP: $APPS_BASE/inst/apps/$CONTEXT_NAME/ /admin /scripts : ADMIN_SCRIPTS_HOME: Find all AD scripts here /appl : APPL_CONFIG_HOME. For standalone envs, this is set to $APPL_TOP /fnd/12.0.0/secure : FND_SECURE: dbc files here /admin : All Env Config files here /certs : SSL Certificates go here /logs : LOG_HOME: Central log file location. All log files are placed here (except adconfig) /ora : ORA_CONFIG_HOME /10.1.2 : 'C' Oracle home config, Contains tnsnames and forms listener servlet config files /10.1.3 : Apache & OC4J config home, Apache, OC4J and opmn This is the 'Java' oracle home configuration for OPMN, Apache and OC4J /pids : Apache/Forms server PID files here /portal : Apache's DocumentRoot folder Shared Application Tier File System We can configure multiple application node machines working with a single EBusiness Suite database node. This creation of a "multi-node" E-Business Suite instance is frequently done to lower cost of ownership (many small machines are cheaper than one big one), increase fault tolerance (one machine fails, others do not), or scale the instance (support more users and a greater load). When configuring Oracle E-Business Suite to use a shared application tier file system, the application tier node can be configured to perform any of the standard application tier services, such as Forms, Web, and Concurrent Processing (Batch). Note the following definitions: Node A node/server/instance is a logical set of processes running on one hardware machine. In a single-node installation of Oracle E-Business Suite, all the Applications processes

(including the database processes) run on one node, whereas in a multi-node installation, the processes are distributed across multiple nodes. A multi-node installation of Release 12 supports both shared and non-shared application tier file systems. An application tier file system consists of:

APPL_TOP file system (APPL_TOP and COMMON_TOP directories). Application tier technology stack file system (OracleAS 10.1.2 and 10.1.3 Oracle Homes). Instance Home (INST_TOP) file system. Each application tier has a unique Instance Home file system associated with it.

Service A service is a functional set of Oracle E-Business Suite application processes running on one or more nodes. Where applicable, the term 'service' is replacing the more traditional term of 'server'. Application Tier Services The following are the major application tier services:

Root services Web Entry Point services Web Application services Batch Processing services Other services

So if you have two nodes,one will serve as Primary Node and other will serve as Secondry Node. You can configure both the Application tier node as follows: Primary Application Tier Node A primary application tier node is the first application tier node where the APPL_TOP, COMMON_TOP, OracleAS 10.1.2 Oracle Home and OracleAS 10.1.3 Oracle Home are installed and configured. Secondary Application Tier Node A secondary application tier node is an application tier node where APPL_TOP, COMMON_TOP, 10.1.2 Oracle Home and 10.1.3 Oracle Home are visible and configured. The APPL_TOP, COMMON_TOP, OracleAS 10.1.2 Oracle Home and OracleAS 10.1.3 Oracle Home file system is mounted to this node from the primary application tier node, or from an NFS server. Instance Home Note : In a shared file system, each application tier will have a unique Instance Home, which should be located on the local file system. Shared Application Tier File System Architecture In a shared file system, all application tier files (with the specific exception of the Instance Home file system) are installed on a shared disk resource, which is mounted on each application tier node. Any application tier node can be configured to perform any of the standard application tier services, such as Forms, Web and Concurrent Processing (Batch)

services. All changes made to the shared file system are immediately accessible to all application tier nodes.

Shared Application Tier File System Layout When configuring Oracle E-Business Suite to use a shared application tier file system, an application tier node can be configured to perform any of the standard application tier services, such as Forms, Web, or Concurrent Processing (Batch) services. An application tier will have a unique Instance Home associated with it that cannot be shared with other application tiers. You can configure the services running on an application tier node to match the node's intended role Example Shared File System The following is an example of mount points shared on each application tier node:

COMMON_TOP: /ebiz/oracle/VIS/apps/apps_st/comn APPL_TOP: /ebiz/oracle/VIS/apps/apps_st/appl OracleAS 10.1.2 ORACLE_HOME: /ebiz/oracle/VIS/apps/tech_st/10.1.2 OracleAS 10.1.3 ORACLE_HOME: /ebiz/oracle/VIS/apps/tech_st/10.1.3

In the figure shown below, entitled "Shared Application Tier File System", Serverappl_node1 is the primary application tier node, and uses the file systems /ebiz/oracle/VIS" and /ebiz/oracle/inst. The file system /ebiz/oracle/inst contains the Instance Home, and "/ ebiz/oracle/VIS " contains the APPL_TOP, COMMON_TOP, OracleAS 10.1.2 and 10.1.3 Oracle Home. Server-appl_node2 is the secondary application tier node, and the shared file system /ebiz/oracle/VIS" is also mounted on this node. The file systems "/ebiz/oracle/inst/apps/VIS_appl_node1" and "/ebiz/oracle/inst/apps/VIS_appl_node2" are only visible on the respective nodes.

R12 Installation
Installation Requirement : 1) Disk space requirement: Node Space Required ----------------------------------------------Mid-Tier 28GB DB Tier Prod 45GB DB Tier Vision 133GB 2) Installation is done by root OS user 3) Database OS User created (oracle) 4) Apps OS User created (applmgr) 3) OS Utilities like ar, gcc, g++, ld, ksh, make, X Display Server must exist in PATH. Installation Process : Below are some screen-shots of Oracle Applications R12 Vision Instance Installation. Well the screens are self explanatory, but i have also given some explanation with few screens. Screen1 : Welcome Screen : See everything and press Next.

Screen 2: Wizard Operation : Choose whether you want a fresh installation or upgrade from previous version.

Screen 3: Oracle Configuration Manager : Accept this if you have metalink account and you want support from Oracle. This will ask for Metalink account and Support Identifier in the next screen.

Screen 4: Oracle Configuration Manager Details:

Screen 5: Configuration Choice : If you already have configurations file from previous installation Locate the file and load the configurations from that else Create a new configuration. This option is very helpful, if you have got any error during installation and you want to restart the installation again. In that case you can use the previous selected configurations.

Screen 6: Database Node setup : Provide the DB node details e.g. DB SID, HostName, Domain Name, OS, OS User and Group, and Installation Base Directory. Please note that the installation is done by root user and you need a seperate user for DB account e.g. oracle with dba group.

Screen 7: Primary Apps Node setup : Next is the Primary Application Node setup. Provide the requried details. Notice that it is asking for "Instance Directory" This is the $INST_TOP for this particular node.

Screen 8: Enable/Disable Application Services for Primary Node : As explained earlier, we can have may Appl nodes. I have taken example of two appl nodes (appl_node1 and appl_node2). I have disabled the Batch Processing Services on appl_node1 and will enable it on appl_node2 as explained earlier in :Shared File System Architecutre".

Screen 9 : Node Information :This screen gives the DB and primary node informations. Now click on the Add Server button to add additional Appl node.

Screen 10: Additional node config : This screen shows the additional node setup. Note the Shared File System Checkbox. Check this if you want a single installation and share the installation setup for both the nodes (by NFS mount). And if you want a seperate $INST_TOP for the additional node, dont check the box and provide the paths for that.

Screen 11: Additional node application services : Enable Root Service group and batch processing services for the additional Appl node.

Screen 12 : Node Information : Now this screen shows all the three node information..

Screen 13 : System Status Check

Screen 14: Pre-install Checks : Once all the Checks are passed, proceed for the installation.

Screen 15 : Install in Progress :

Screen 16 : Post install checkes : If any of the check failed, see the error by clicking icon near the item and try to remove the errors. Then again check. If every things is fine. Click Next and Then finish on the next screen.

Screen 17 : Final Screen

Congratulations.. your Oracle Applications R12 Installation is successfully done. Now you can just type the URL in the browser and see beautiful screen of Oracle Apps R12. You can do the initial login with User : SYSADMIN and passowrd : sysadmin. Then create new users with System Administrator Responsibility and PLAY/WORK :).

Oracle Applications R12 Service Management

R12 uses 10.1.3 fusion middle-ware AS stack, hence services in R12 is managed by OPMN(Oracle Process Manager and Notification Server). OPMN consists of two main components (Oracle Process Manager) and (Oracle Notification Server). Oracle Process Manager is responsible for 1) starting 2) stopping 3) restarting 4) monitoring the services it manages (this includes death detection and automatic restart of the process) Oracle Notification Server is the transport mechanism for failure, recovery, startup, and other related notifications between components in AS. Single configuration file(opmn.xml) is used OPMN to manage the services. Config file location is given as $ORA_CONFIG_HOME/10.1.3/opmn/conf/opmn.xml Services managed by opmn are (grep process-type opmn.xml) 1) HTTP_Server 2) oacore 3) forms 4) oafm

Getting OPMN managed running process(es) status bash-2.05$ ./adopmnctl.sh status You are running adopmnctl.sh version 120.4 Checking status of OPMN managed processes... Processes in Instance: VIS_appl_node1.appl_node1.vxindia.veritas.com ---------------------+--------------------+-----------+--------ias-component | process-type | pid | status ---------------------+--------------------+-----------+--------OC4J | oafm | 13500 | Alive OC4J | forms | 28358 | Alive OC4J | oacore | 15899 | Alive HTTP_Server | HTTP_Server | 23530 | Alive ASG | ASG | N/A | Down adopmnctl.sh: exiting with status 0 adopmnctl.sh: check the logfile /ebiz/oracle/VIS/inst/apps/VIS_appl_node1/logs/appl/admin/log/adopmnctl.txt for more information Starting OPMN managed Services Starting Complete OC4J container bash-2.05$ ./adopmnctl.sh startproc ias-component=OC4J Starting individual process-type(s) bash-2.05$ ./adopmnctl.sh startproc ias-component=OC4J process-type= oafm bash-2.05$ ./adopmnctl.sh startproc ias-component=OC4J process-type= forms bash-2.05$ ./adopmnctl.sh startproc ias-component=OC4J process-type= oacore Starting HTTP Server (Apache) bash-2.05$ ./adopmnctl.sh startproc ias-component=HTTP_Server Stoping OPMN managed Services Stoping Complete OC4J container bash-2.05$ ./adopmnctl.sh stopproc ias-component=OC4J Stoping individual process-type(s) bash-2.05$ ./adopmnctl.sh stopproc ias-component=OC4J process-type= oafm bash-2.05$ ./adopmnctl.sh stopproc ias-component=OC4J process-type= forms bash-2.05$ ./adopmnctl.sh stopproc ias-component=OC4J process-type= oacore Stoping HTTP Server (Apache) bash-2.05$ ./adopmnctl.sh stopproc ias-component=HTTP_Server Benefits of OPMN

There are many benefits because of OPMN. To give an example, Consider the scenario where one of your OC4J process has died. OPMN detects the death of the process which it manages and brings up in almost no time. To elucidate this here is an example bash-2.05$ ./adopmnctl.sh status You are running adopmnctl.sh version 120.4 Checking status of OPMN managed processes... Processes in Instance: VIS_appl_node1.appl_node1.vxindia.veritas.com ---------------------+--------------------+-----------+--------ias-component | process-type | pid | status ---------------------+--------------------+-----------+--------OC4J | oafm | 13500 | Alive OC4J | forms | 15898 | Alive OC4J | oacore | 15899 | Alive HTTP_Server | HTTP_Server | 23530 | Alive ASG | ASG | N/A | Down adopmnctl.sh: exiting with status 0 adopmnctl.sh: check the logfile /ebiz/oracle/VIS/inst/apps/VIS_appl_node1/logs/appl/admin/log/adopmnctl.txt for more information ... All the OPMN managed processes are alive. Lets see, how opmn reacts to the death of the oacore OC4J process. I have killed the process with PID - 15898 bash-2.05$ kill -9 15898 bash-2.05$ ./adopmnctl.sh status You are running adopmnctl.sh version 120.4 Checking status of OPMN managed processes... Processes in Instance: VIS_appl_node1.appl_node1.vxindia.veritas.com ---------------------+--------------------+-----------+--------ias-component | process-type | pid | status ---------------------+--------------------+-----------+--------OC4J | oafm | 13500 | Alive OC4J | forms | 28358 | Init OC4J | oacore | 15899 | Alive HTTP_Server | HTTP_Server | 23530 | Alive ASG | ASG | N/A | Down adopmnctl.sh: exiting with status 0 adopmnctl.sh: check the logfile /ebiz/oracle/VIS/inst/apps/VIS_appl_node1/logs/appl/admin/log/adopmnctl.txt for more information ...

Within no time, OPMN detects the death and restarts the process it manages.(one or two seconds users will face the failures due to the process unavailability to serve the requests) $LOG_HOME/ora/10.1.3/opmn/opmn.log is appened with the information ( it dumps the death detection and restart information) 08/05/02 12:34:04 [pm-process] Process Crashed: OC4J~forms~default_group~1 (691565399:15898) - Restarting 08/05/02 12:34:04 [pm-process] Starting Process: OC4J~forms~default_group~1 (691565400:0) 08/05/02 12:34:24 [pm-process] Process Alive: OC4J~forms~default_group~1 (691565400:28358) This is one of greatest advantage you will get when you have R12, Even if oacore JVM crashes due to out of memory issue, opmn restarts after it detects OC4J has died. What algorithm OPMN uses to detect the death? 1) OS process is checked by OPMN for every 2 seconds. 2) forward ping: periodically OPMN pings the process for every 20 seconds and expects response 3) reverse ping: every 20 seconds managed process sends OPMN a ping notification Script Details All the admin scripts are running the opmnctl in the background from the $ORACLE_CONFIG_HOME/opmn/bin directory. This environment variable is set in the $INST_TOP/apps/VIS_appl_node1/ora/10.1.3/VIS_appl_node1.env file. This contains all the required environment variables needed by opmnctl to run. So this file needs to be sourced before running the opmnctl for Ebiz. bash-2.05# pwd /ebiz/oracle/VIS/inst/apps/VIS_appl_node1/ora/10.1.3 bash-2.05# ls Apache cfgtoollogs deconfig VIS_appl_node1.env config j2ee bash-2.05# opmn/bin/opmnctl status Unable to connect to opmn. Opmn may not be up. bash-2.05# source VIS_appl_node1.env bash-2.05# opmn/bin/opmnctl status Processes in Instance: VIS_appl_node1.appl_node1.vxindia.veritas.com javacache network opmn

-------------------+--------------------+---------+--------ias-component | process-type | pid | status -------------------+--------------------+---------+--------OC4J | oafm | N/A | Down OC4J | forms | 8071 | Alive OC4J | oacore | N/A | Down HTTP_Server | HTTP_Server | 16572 | Alive ASG | ASG | N/A | Down