This is a high level overview of the installation process for Oracle Application Server 10g on SLES9. It is not intended as a full installation guide or a step-by-step detailed path of what has been done to install the software. I will focus only on the major steps needed to complete the installation. This document picks up where network services leaves off and assumes the server already has SLES9 installed and configured for remote access.
To start off the box must be prepped for Oracle installation. Novell has a utility to set base kernel parameters and create the oracle user. I installed that package and modified the oracle user's settings for shell and password to suit our environment. A number of environment variables are set by that package that could interfere with the OAS install such as TNS_ADMIN, so following the installation of Novell's SLES rpm for oracle I unset those environment variables. The next step was to download the installation media from Oracle. As the oracle user I downloaded the install media from Oracle and unpacked them into the oracle base directory of the application server. I also moved a copy of the install files to the database server and ran an infrastructure install with repository only to ensure I had a clean metadata repository built before moving on to the infrastructure install. After creating the metadata repository on the database server I moved back to the OAS server to begin the install.
On the application server as the oracle user I ran Oracle Universal installer and selected the Infrastructure only option for install. This allowed me to set up instances for OID and SSO connected to the already existing repository in our RAC. Once that was tweaked to run consistently I moved on to perform the OAS BI install to configure Reports, Discoverer, Portal and Wireless. This install was a bit more difficult and it did not move all of the java components needed to start reliably. I had to tweak the java packages it referenced to get it to function as expected. There was no package that would reliably start the infrastructure and BI instances properly, so I created one myself. I used the standard Oracle init.d script and modified it to SLES standards to be able to start both instances in order. By using the SLES standards I ensured that the startup parameters could be accessed and modified through the YaST /etc/sysconfig manager.
Once the install was completed on the primary server I moved on to set up the second server. I created an OAS cluster in the default farm on the first server and moved the infrastructure instance into the cluster to ensure the cluster was available on install. During the install on the second server, however, I was prompted to enter the virtual host name and the port for the external load balancer. The installation would not continue without the existence of an external load balancer and a virtual host set up. An external load balancer is also needed in order to setup multiple server balancing for OAS grid.
