Today, we participated in two WebLogic presentations – and won the WebLogic Hackathon contest! But first, let’s talk about the sessions.

The first session was a summarized overview of the Weblogic installation process.
There are two manners to proceed. On the one hand, you can use a GUI based interface, and on the other, you can use the silent mode.
At the end of the presentation, we installed a new Weblogic domain in a virtual machine configured by the presentation speakers.

They managed to automatically setup the networking environment over a private dedicated network for the room, and to share everything we need to download in order to achieve our installation.
Afterwards, we installed an Admin Server, followed by a Managed Server. All installation procedures where done in silent mode, as no X server was installed in the virtual machine.
The interesting thing here for us is that we now have a fully automated script-based manner for the installation of a complete Weblogic domain, in silent mode, and using the node manager.

On the second presentation, the speakers talked about how to manage configuration files on big heterogeneous environments, including Weblogic, and potentially many more IT products.
In order to help administrators and architects, you can deploy one of the following products: Puppet and/or Chef.

Their main particularity advantages are:

  • Avoiding of repetitive tasks
  • OS independency
  • Keep the servers in sync, with always up-to-date configurations
  • Configuration version control

To summarize, such a “king of products” can pull a configuration file on servers all over an organization network, in a scheduled period of time. Both are equivalent in terms of features and quality. Both run using a central server that communicates with an agent installed on the client servers. It seems that Puppet is more broadly used, as we already have seen it at one of our customers.

Weblogic Hackathon contest

And now to the most interesting: The Weblogic Hackathon contest!

After the second presentation, we split into groups of 3-4 persons and the challenge was to be able to install either a Puppet or Chef Master/Agent in two new virtual machines. The team who did that first, won the right to discuss on-line with the OTN presentation manager.

dbi services was one of the team leaders, as all installation operations were performed on our laptop. We configured a Puppet Master server and an Agent and were able to automatically install a Java Virtual Machine and another Weblogic domain on the client virtual machine (Admin and Managed servers).
We did it! Another trophy won by dbi services, and it will surely not be the last one!