Tag: vagrant

Oracle Database 19c on Oracle Linux 9 (OL9): Installation Articles and Vagrant Builds

Earlier this year I wrote a rant about the lack of product certifications on Oracle Linux 9 (OL9).

One of the points I made was we are having to replace OL7 servers, but were forced to go to OL8 because Oracle 19c was not certified on OL9, and Oracle 23c on-prem is not available.

This blog post by Mike DieTrich changed all that because now 19c is certified on OL9, provided you are on patch 19.19 or above, and are on the correct version of UEK or the RHEL kernel. See Mike’s post for details.

Installation Articles

Of course, this triggered some installation articles.

Vagrant Builds

There are database, RAC and Data Guard vagrant builds here.

Odd Occurrence

I noticed something a little odd when doing these builds using the 19.21 RU patches.

For the database and Data Guard builds I used the DB RU and OJVM combo patch, and I was still forced to fake the distribution using the CV_ASSUME_DISTID environment variable. For the RAC build I used the GI RU and OJVM combo patch, and I didn’t need to fake the distribution.

I went back to the DB build, and instead used the GI RU and OJVM combo patch, and I no longer needed to fake the distribution. So it looks like there is something different about the database patches between these two types of RUs that slightly affect the installation process. It’s no big deal, but it might catch you out.

Oracle 19c is old. Why do you care?

We are in the process of replacing a load of VMs that are currently running OL7, and we want to go to OL9. Prior to this announcement were were going to have to do one of two things.

  • Migrate to 19c on OL8, which would be OK for 23c when it drops, but not ideal as building an OL8 box now seems like a fail.
  • Wait for 23c on-prem to drop and move to 23c on OL9. The problem here is we could run out of time waiting for 23c to come.

This announcement gives us a new option.

  • Migrate to 19c on OL9, then upgrade to 23c when the on-prem version drops.

This third option is way better for us!

Remember

There are a couple of things to remember.

  • You need to be on 19c to upgrade to 23c, so getting your 19c database on an OS that is supported for 23c is important. We’ve had confirmation that 23c will be available for OL8 and OL9 on release.
  • The extended support waiver for 19c was increased from 1 year to 2 years. Mike also wrote about this here. That means you get free extended support for 19c until April 30, 2026.

Conclusion

This is massive for us. I’m very happy!

Cheers

Tim…

Answering some questions about Vagrant

Someone on YouTube asked me some general questions about my experience of Vagrant, so I thought I would write them down as a blog post.

Could you share the story of when and how you first encountered Vagrant, and how did you feel about it at the time?

I was quite late to the party. In 2017 I was at a VMware workshop in Cork, Ireland. I was sitting in the hotel and Frits Hoogland was showing me his Vagrant build for a test Oracle database. Like most things when they are unfamiliar, it seemed a little complex. He gave me access to his Vagrant repository, but I hardly looked at it. It was on my list of things to do, but there is always so much on my to-do list. When Frits talks you should listen, but unfortunately I failed that mission. 🙂

About a year later a colleague at work asked me what Vagrant was, and I struggled to give a reasonable answer. That evening I Googled it, and tried a couple of really simple builds. As someone with lots of VMs at home it totally blew my mind. From that point on I was hooked. I wrote Vagrant builds for all my test databases, so I could rebuild them whenever I wanted to. I went from never using it, to never shutting up about it overnight.

Now my PC is a lot less bloated. I don’t have to keep loads of VMs for different database versions, RAC and Data Guard etc. If I need something to do a test I just build it from scratch.

Another benefit is it makes live demos feel a lot less stressful. I remember being in my hotel in India, and a few minutes before I was due to start presenting I was having some issues with my demo VM. I just typed “vagrant destroy -f” followed by “vagrant up” and my demo system was rebuilt and I was good to go. Nightmare averted, and no need for loads of backups and snapshots.

How long does it usually takes for you to create the builds that are used to create the database?

The first couple of real builds took some time as there was a learning curve with Vagrant. Fortunately I have a lot of Oracle skills and some basic system administration skills, so it wasn’t too bad. It would have been a lot harder if I was trying to pick up several new skills at the same time.

All my Vagrant builds are based on articles, so I already know what to do. I’m basically tweaking the instructions from my articles to form the Vagrant builds.

The more vagrant builds you do, the quicker you get at doing them, because you have a repository of previous builds to pull ideas from. I’m now at the point where most new builds are slight variations of a previous build, so they are really quick to write.

How are you using Vagrant at work? I assume that some companies will require us to install the database with its options in a bare metal server, and not with VMs.

I use Vagrant at home. All my writing is based on VMs I’m running at home. Those VMs are built using Vagrant.

Automation at work is a little tricky because there is a separation of duties between virtualization, system administration and DBA teams. Configuring a complete automation is quite time consuming and political. Terraform and Ansible are more commonly used at work, but we are still on that journey. We are less DevOps and more DevHopeful. 🙂

Our cloud automations all use Terraform. Terraform is similar to Vagrant, as both are produced by Hashicorp.

The tools you use for automation are not as important as the attitude. Once you get into automation you can switch between tools a lot more easily, because you understand the approach you need to take.

How does using Vagrant help you in serving your customers?

Using Vagrant at home makes it quick to set up new environments, which allows me to learn new stuff faster. I don’t like doing anything at work unless I’ve already tried it at home. I guess me knowing more helps me do my job better, which ultimately benefits the people depending on me at work, so I guess there is an indirect relationship. 🙂

How do you learn Vagrant?

If you want to know more about Vagrant you can start here.

I find the easiest way to learn about Vagrant is to build things. There are loads of builds on the internet to use for inspiration. You can find mine here.

Cheers

Tim…

VirtualBox 7.0.4 and Vagrant 2.3.3 – Another VirtualBox Fail (For Me)…

VirtualBox 7.0.4

Please read the update at the bottom of this post before making any conclusions. I wanted to leave the rest of the post unedited, but needed to update my current situation as it has changed since this post was written…

VirtualBox 7.0.4 has been released.

The downloads and changelog are in the normal places.

From my previous posts on VirtualBox 7.0.x you will know I’ve been having problems with it. They all seem to come down to networking. I can often, but not always, start up an existing VM, but if I try to build a new VM with Vagrant it will fail to setup the networking. Also, if I attempt to use Packer, it will fail to find the kickstart file, which it attempts to access over HTTPS. Both cases seem to be network related.

I’ve done all the usual firewall and antivirus stuff, and trawled the internet to see if anyone else has a solution. None of that has helped.

When I saw VirtualBox 7.0.4 I was hoping this might solve my problem, but no. I get the same issues on Windows 11, Windows 10 and macOS (Intel). This makes VirtualBox 7.0.4 unusable for me.

When I revert back to VirtualBox 6.1.40, everything works as expected…

I don’t know if this is just me, or if a lot of people are having problems with VirtualBox. It seems odd that I am getting the same result on multiple machines on two fundamentally different architectures though.

So my current suggestion would be use this at your own risk…

Vagrant 2.3.3

Vagrant 2.3.3 has also been born. Upgrading to this didn’t cause or solve any issues for me. Even though I’ve had to revert back to VirtualBox 6.1.40, this new version of Vagrant is working fine for me.

Packer 1.8.4

At some point since my last run of Packer builds version 1.8.4 was released. This follows the same pattern. It works great with VirtualBox 6.1.40, but doesn’t work at all with VirtualBOx 7.0.x.

Conclusion

Sadly VirtualBox 7.0.x is still a bust for me. Maybe I’m the only one on the planet, but it is unusable for me. I hope this changes in the future as I rely on VirtualBox bigtime…

Cheers

Tim…

Update: I’ve now switched to using VirtualBox 7.0.4 completely, and all issues have been resolved. This post by Frits Hoogland explained what my problem was. This is solved by adding the “–nat-localhostreachable1” parameter. That solved my Packer problem, and subsequent VM problems. Happy days…

Update 2: An update from Simon Coter suggests the issue is due to the way Vagrant and Packer use the VirtualBox CLI, rather than the API. The workaround mentioned in the previous update is still the easiest way to move forward.

APEX 22.2 : Vagrant and Docker Updates

I know it’s hard to believe that anything happened last week other than the implosion of Twitter, but APEX 22.2 was also released.

As normal, this resulted in a bunch of updates to my builds.

Vagrant

All relevant Vagrant builds were updated to include APEX 22.2. Many had been updated recently to bring them in line with the latest Oracle security patches. You can find the build here.

https://github.com/oraclebase/vagrant

Docker/Container

As with Vagrant, all the relevant Docker/Container builds have been updated to 22.2. You can find the build here.

https://github.com/oraclebase/dockerfiles

Real World

If the release had been a couple of weeks earlier I would have been able to push it out during this quarters patching cycle. Unfortunately this release will now how to wait until the January 2023 patching cycle for me to push it out at work.

Our APEX upgrades/patches are automated (as mentioned here), so I could push this release out at the press of a button, but all the relevant teams would have to do their testing, and that probably isn’t going to happen until the next patching cycle, so it’s just going to wait until then. 🙁

My Suggestion

Even if your work environment moves forward at a slower pace than you would like, it still makes sense to keep a test/play environment at the latest and greatest versions, so you can learn the new stuff and see what issues are coming round the corner for your applications.

All my home builds are now on APEX 22.2, running on the beta release of the Oracle Games Console (#OGC). 😉

Cheers

Tim…

VirtualBox 7.0.2 and Vagrant 2.3.2

VirtualBox 7.0.2

Hot on the heels of VirtualBox 7.0, we now have VirtualBox 7.0.2. I’m not going to lie, I expected this release to happen really quickly, as VirtualBox 7.0 gave me a number of headaches.

The downloads and changelog are in the normal places.

I’m hoping this fix solves a lot of my problems.

  • Main: Fixed issue when VBoxSVC could become unresponsive if Extension Pack was not installed (bug #21167)

I’ve installed 7.0.2 on a couple of Windows machines (10 and 11), and I’m going to play with it today.

Vagrant 2.3.2

As mentioned in my post about VirtualBox 7.0, Vagrant 2.3.1 doesn’t support VirtualBox 7.0 directly, so I was expecting a quick release of Vagrant and here it is. Vagrant 2.3.2 has a single feature in its changelog.

  • provider/virtualbox: Add support for VirtualBox 7.0 [GH-12947]

I’ll be attempting some new Packer builds of my Vagrant boxes, then working through my Vagrant and Docker builds to add in the new patches. That should give it a pretty good test. I’ll update this post with the results.

If this doesn’t work out, I’ll be reverting to VirtualBox 6.1.40…

Cheers

Tim…

Updates

Update 1: The good news is VMs seem to start OK now using Vagrant 2.3.2 and VirtualBox 7.0.2. (not true, see below)

The bad news is I can’t get Packer to work, so I’m unable to build new Vagrant boxes with the 7.0.2 guest additions. I’ve tried on Windows 10, Windows 11 and macOS (Intel) and all result in the same issue. It seems the kickstart is not working, like the networking on VirtualBox 7.0.2 is screwed up somewhere.

I’ve downgraded my Windows 10 PC to use VirtualBox 6.1.40 and I’m building new Vagrant boxes on that. So far so good. I’ll upload them to Vagrant Cloud and attempt to use them with VirtualBox 7.0.2. The guest additions will be out of date, but it should still work fine, I hope. I’ll keep updating…

Update 2: After a couple of successes starting up VMs using VirtualBox 7.0.2 and Vagrant 2.3.2, it all seems to have caved in now.

I’m going to switch to VirtualBox 6.1.40 for the moment. I don’t have more time to waste on this. VirtualBox and Vagrant are tools I use to make my life easier, not an end in themselves, so I don’t have the time to keep working on this. I’m sure a future version of VirtualBox will have sorted out its networking issues and I’ll be able to use it…

Update 3: Everything is reverted to VirtualBox 6.1.40. Packer builds of OL7, OL8 and OL9 are completed and uploaded to Vagrant Cloud. I’ve started to do some Vagrant builds with them now and they seem to be working fine, so what I’m seeing is on VirtualBox 6.1.40 everything works as usual. On VirtualBox 7.0.2 I see these two issues.

  • Packer just doesn’t work. It fails getting the HTTP access to the kickstart file. I get the same issue on Windows 10, Windows 11 and macOS (Intel).
  • Starting VirtualBox VMs with Vagrant is hit-or-miss. Sometimes they work, but sometimes they fail. It also seems network related, but I can’t be 100% about that.

Update 4: An update from Simon Coter suggests the issue is due to the way Vagrant and Packer use the VirtualBox CLI, rather than the API. The workaround for this was posted by Frits Hoogland here.

Packer, Vagrant and Docker : Latest Changes

The quarterly Oracle security patches trigger a whole bunch of build changes for me. This post just gives you a run through of what happened over the weekend.

Packer

The release of VirtualBox 6.1.36 means all my Vagrant boxes on Vagrant Cloud have the wrong guest additions, so I rebuilt all of them using Packer. The Oracle Linux 7, 8 and 9 boxes are now up to date. You can see my Packer builds under my Vagrant repository on GitHub here.

https://github.com/oraclebase/vagrant/tree/master/packer

Note. During the packer builds I noticed the VirtualBox 6.1.36 guest additions require some extra packages during the installation (libX11, libXt, libXext, libXmu).

Vagrant

I had recently updated all relevant Vagrant builds with the latest versions of Tomcat, SQLcl and ORDS updates, but I was still waiting on the OpenJDK 11.0.16 release. On Friday morning I noticed Adoptium released it, so I made the necessary changes to the builds to include it. I usually don’t include Oracle patches in my database builds, but some installations, like Oracle 19c on OL8, require them. I’ve updated them to include the 19.16 patches where necessary. You can find my Vagrant builds on GitHub here.

https://github.com/oraclebase/vagrant

Docker

Similar to the Vagrant section above, the relevant Docker/Podman builds were updated to use OpenJDK 11.0.16, and the Oracle 19c on OL8 build had it’s patch script modified for the 19.16 patches. You can find my container stuff on GitHub here.

https://github.com/oraclebase/dockerfiles

Happy building!

Cheers

Tim…

ORDS and APEX 22.1 : Vagrant and Docker Builds

I was on top of the recent ORDS 22.1 release, but somehow I managed to miss the APEX 22.1 release. Here’s an update on what’s been going on with my builds…

Vagrant Builds

A number of my Vagrant database builds include APEX. Those that do have been updated to use APEX 22.1. You can find them here.

They had already been updated to use the latest versions of Java, Tomcat, ORDS and SQLcl where appropriate, so the APEX upgrade was a small change. The ORDS update was done 11 days ago. It was a bigger update, as the installation process for ORDS 22.1 has changed quite a bit. I wrote about that here.

You can read my beginner’s guide to Vagrant here.

Docker/Container Builds

I have some ORDS containers that include the APEX images, so those image builds have been updated to use ORDS 22.1 and APEX 22.1 images now.

APEX is also included in the database builds. You can find them here.

I was a little slow to add the updates to the Docker builds. The Tomcat and SQLcl changes were done a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve only added the Java, ORDS and APEX changes today. I held back a little on the ORDS 22.1 changes, as I was rewriting a bunch of articles that were affected by the installation and configuration changes.

You can read my Docker/Container articles here.

Real Life

We probably won’t be putting APEX 22.1 live until the next patching cycle, which will be July. In the past I could be quite aggressive about the upgrades, but as APEX is becoming more important in the organisation, the rollout of updates has to be a bit more considered. 🙂

The same will probably be true for the ORDS 22.1 rollout. We run ORDS in containers, so it’s really quick and easy to replace all the infrastructure, but I wanted to be a bit cautious because of all the changes in the new version. Having played with it a bit now, I’m feeling a lot more confident, but at the time we were starting our patching cycle I was too nervous to include it.

As far as home systems are concerned, I only use the latest and greatest, unless there is a compelling reason not to. 😉

Cheers

Tim…

APEX 21.2 : Vagrant and Docker Builds

Unless you live under a rock, you’ll have seen APEX 21.2 was released yesterday. Being the worlds worst APEX developer, I’m not going to speak about the new release, as I’ll just embarrass myself, but I did want to give a heads-up of what I’ve been doing since the release.

Vagrant Builds

A number of my Vagrant database builds include APEX. Those that do have been updated to use APEX 21.2. You can find them here.

They had already been updated to use the latest versions of Java, Tomcat, ORDS and SQLcl where appropriate, so the APEX upgrade was a small change.

You can read my beginner’s guide to Vagrant here.

Docker/Container Builds

I have some ORDS containers that include the APEX images, so those image builds have been updated to use the APEX 21.2 images now. You can find them here.

As with the Vagrant builds, these had already been updated to use the latest versions of Java, Tomcat, ORDS and SQLcl where appropriate.

You can read my Docker/Container articles here.

Thoughts

It’s taken a long time for us to roll out APEX 21.1 at work. Most of that delay is because of competing priorities. We’ve been pushing the Oracle 19c database upgrades hard, and it’s not left much space to focus on APEX. The last of our production systems will be upgraded to APEX 21.1 next week, so I’m not sure how eager people will be when I start pushing 21.2. 🙂 I’ll try, but it might have to wait until next quarter’s security patching. We’ll see.

Despite that, APEX 21.1 is now dead to me. Long live APEX 21.2. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Database 21c Express Edition (XE) : Article and Vagrant Builds

You probably saw a stream of Tweets yesterday mentioning the release of Oracle database 21c Express Edition (XE) for Linux. It’s a very important release as it’s totally free to use.

Of course I had a play as soon as I got hold of it. If you’ve used one of the RPM installations of Oracle before, there shouldn’t be any surprises. The approach for the XE RPM installation is similar to that of the Enterprise Edition RPM installation. Here’s a quick run through.

I also added a couple of Vagrant builds for Oracle 21c XE on Oracle Linux 7 and 8.

I suspect this release has made a lot of people very happy! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Database 21c : Installation Articles, Vagrant and Docker Builds

As you have no doubt heard, Oracle database 21c was released on Friday. I went to work over the weekend doing the relevant articles and builds. They’ve been on the front page of the website since Sunday, but I was waiting for the release of the 21c preinstall package before announcing them. That has arrived now, so this is what I was up to at the weekend.

Installation Articles

First the articles for single instance, Data Guard, RAC and RPM installations.

Vagrant

There are a bunch of associated Vagrant builds on Oracle Linux 8 and 7.

Single instance database installs, using the conventional installation method, and the RPM installation.

Data Guard installs.

RAC installs.

Docker

There are two database builds for 21c database in containers.

Caution

As I wrote in my previous post, Oracle 21c is an innovation release. It’s good to play with this, but be careful when considering it for production.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I’m struggling to notice the difference between “21” and “12” when reading at the moment. 🙂