Oracle BPEL: What's up with it?

Nearly 20 years ago there was a new standard for modelling business processes: BPEL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Process_Execution_Language)
Oracle bought Collaxa and released the Oracle BPEL Process Manager.
In 2009 i wrote some posts over tutorials, which where from collaxa and which were very useful for starting with Oracle BPEL product:
http://dietrichschroff.blogspot.com/search?q=lost+collaxa

And what is left today?

The product is still listed on Oracle homepage:

And there is a section with some "news":

But the version number 10.1.3.4 is not really somehing new and if you open the white paper you will see:

 

I think a whitepaper from 2014 is not really something new. 

If you take a look on the BPEL specification at oasis (http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsbpel/2.0/OS/wsbpel-v2.0-OS.html), you can see, that there was no update to the BPEL standard for more than 10 years. 

It is very sad, that this concept of modelling processes in a graphical way was unsuccessful...

Oracle VM Server: OVMAPI_2005E and OVMEVT_003503D_000

In my OVM environment i was trying to delete a server from a pool and this did not work. The error i got signalled was:

OVMAPI_2005E "[ServerDbImpl] xx:yy:zz:... (oraclevm)" contains a component "xx:yy:zz:..." in error. Error event: server.cluster.failure., Summary: Server Cluster Failure, Description: Failed to leave cluster OVMEVT_003503D_000 Server reboot is required..

I rebootet the server: still the same error.
I rebootet the ovm manager: still the same error.

Then i realized, that there was a red cross at my server:

The solution was: Select events from the drop down for this server:

There i had to "Acknowledge" the events and after that i was able to remove the server without any further error...

Oracle VM Server: Pool is locked forever

If you are using Oracle VM Server it is possible that you are hitting the following problem:

After changing something on a server pool the pool gets locked and the lock stays there:

Even a reboot of your OVMM (oracle vm manager) does not remove the lock.

The solution can be very easy:
Just edit the pool and add (or change) the description.

This edit triggers an update and removes the lock. I think every other change would do the job, but this is a minimal change, which solves the problem...

Hopefully there will be an update, so this problem will disappear in future versions.

Oracle Cloud: Feature Set

For all readers, who want to get a short overview to the services which can be configured inside Oracle Cloud, here a walkthrough the menus.
The Main menu shows the following items:

• Core infrastructure
• Compute
• Block Storage
• Object Storage
• File Storage
• Networking 
• Database
• Bare Metal, VM, and Exadata
• Autonomous Data Warehouse
• Autonomous Transaction Processing
• Data Sale
• Exadata Cloud Connector
• Solution and Patterns
• Analytics
• Resource Manager
• Email Delivery
• Application Integration
• Monitoring
• Developer Services Marketplace
• Governance and Administration
• Account Management
• Identity
  

Inside the Compute item the following services can be found:

• Compute
• Instances
• Dedicated Virtual Hosts
• Instance Configurations
• Cluster Networks
• Autoscaling Configurations
• Custom Images
• Boot Volumes
• Boot Volume Backups

• Block Storage
• Block Volumes
• Block Volume Backups
• Volumes Groups
• Volume Group Backups

• Object Storage
• Object Storage
• Data Transfer

• File Storage
• File Systems
• Mount Targets

• Networking
• Virtual Cloud Networks
• Dynamic Routing Gateways
• Customer-Premises Equipments
• IPSec Connections
• Load Balancers
• FastConnect
• Public IPs
• DNS Zone Management
• Traffic Management Steering Policies

• Administration
• Tenancy Details
• Announcements

The menu Database has no subitems.

For most of these services you can find documentation here:
https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/home.htm

Oracle cloud: Login

Main problem for login into Oracle cloud is to there is no generic login URL.
Inside the mail Oracle sent after the registration there is a specific URL. Something like:

http://app.response.oracle-mail.com/e/er?elq_mid=920.......

But this ends after some seconds at:

https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/sign-in

 

There is also another login page, but this one does not work for my setup:

https://login.eu-frankfurt-1.oraclecloud.com/v1/oauth2/authorize

For this one i did not find any documentation at all, so i somebody knows how this login page can be used, please add a comment...

Oracle Cloud: my first VM

After some problems with signing up i created my first vm inside Oracle Cloud:

 

 and then a short stop for provisioning:

 And finally:

The machine runs and a login can be done with:

schroff@zerberus:~/.ssh$ ssh 130.61.89.226 -l opc
[opc@myVmInstanceDS ~]$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs        459M     0  459M   0% /dev
tmpfs           486M     0  486M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           486M   13M  473M   3% /run
tmpfs           486M     0  486M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda3        39G  1,9G   37G   5% /
/dev/sda1       200M  9,7M  191M   5% /boot/efi
tmpfs            98M     0   98M   0% /run/user/1000
[opc@myVmInstanceDS ~]$ 

Oracle cloud: sign up: after nearly 2 weeks...

After trying to get around my problems with my

• e-mail account (don't use gmx.de - gmail.com works)
• veryfying the authorization amount for my credit card (Thanks to my bank for supporting me!)

i was able to sign up at Oracle cloud services.
Thanks to Oracle support for the e-mails with tips and explanations what i have to do!

And after some seconds i got the following e-mail:

And the sign in worked:

With the next postings i will try to get some VMs etc. running inside Oracle Cloud...

Oracle Sign up: more problems

I thought, i was successful, but:

I received a mail with the following content:

"We have re-authorized a new, specific amount on the credit/debit card used during the sign up process."

and

"To verify the account you have created, please confirm the specific amount re-authorized."


My problem: there is not any "re-authorized amount" on my banking account. I do not know, what is "re-authorized"?
Is this: this amount is charged on my credit card (then i should see it).
Or is this process buggy and i was for some reason not charged?
Or is re-authorization something else?

Oracle Cloud: First login

After signing up to Oracle cloud i tried my first login:

https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/sign-in

but i only got:

I think the problem is, that there i a manual review step on Oracle's side which i have not passed for now:

So let's wait for a day or two...

Oracle Cloud: Sign up failed... [3] & solved

Finally (see my attempts here and here) i was able to sign up to Oracle cloud.
What did the trick?

I got help from Oracle support:

 

So i used my gmail address and this worked:

and then:

Let's see how this cloud will work compared to Azure and AWS

Oracle Cloud: Sign up failed... [2]

After my failed registration to Oracle cloud, i got very fast an email from Oracle support with the following requirements:

So i tried once again with a firefox "private" window - but this failed again.
Next idea was to use a completely new installed browser: so i tried with a fresh google-chrome.
But the error still remained:

Let's hope Oracle support has another thing which will put me onto Oracle cloud.

UPDATE:

 

There is a tiny link "click here" just abouve the blue button. This link a have to use with the verification code provided by Oracle support.
But then the error is:

I checked this a VISA and MASTERCARD. Neither of them worked...

UPDATE 2: see here how the problem was solved.

Oracle Cloud: Sign up failed...

Yesterday i tried to sign up for oracle cloud:

 So let's start the registration process:

 

The mobile number verification is done with SMS and after entering the 7 digit pin, you are allowed to enter a password:

 

As payment information only credit cards are accepted:

• VISA
• Mastercard
• Amex

Eve though my credit card was accepted:

"Your credit card has been successfully validated. Please proceed to complete the Sign up."

I got the following error:

"We're unable to process your transaction. Please contact Oracle Customer Service."
The link "Oracle Customer Service" did not work, so i used the Chat Support. But inside the chat was no agent available and only "Send E-Mail" worked. Let's see what kind of response i will be given...

EDIT: Some further attempts...

EDIT 2: see here how the problem was solved.  

Oracle VM Server: Why the server uuid is important and why changes to this uuid are critical

After working a while with Oracle VM server it turns out, that a very important parameter is the UUID of a Oracle VM server.

This UUID is used by the ovs-agent (take a look at the Oracle documentation). Here a few excerpts of these chapter:

The Oracle VM Agent is a daemon that runs within dom0 on each Oracle VM Server instance. Its primary role is to facilitate communication between Oracle VM Server and Oracle VM Manager.
[...]
Oracle VM Agent is responsible for carrying out all of the configuration changes required on an Oracle VM Server instance, in accordance with the messages that are sent to it by Oracle VM Manager.
[...]
If you wish to allow another Oracle VM Manager instance to take ownership of the server, the original Oracle VM Manager instance must release ownership first.
[...]
Oracle VM Agent also maintains its own log files on the Oracle VM Server that can be used for debugging issues on a particular server instance or for auditing purposes. 

The oracle vm server gets identified at the oracle vm manager by its UUID. There is a very nice blogposting from Bjorn Naessens:
https://bjornnaessens.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/best-practices-in-ovm-2-fakeuuid-it/
He made his way through the source code and comes up with the following important things about this uuid:

From an architectural point of view, this is a really bad way, because the UUID will change, if you change the motherboard SMBIOS oder change a network MAC.
With loosing your UUID, the OVS-agent will no longer communicate with your OVM-manager and therfore you can not start/stop any VM on that host.

You can get the UUID of a server from the OVM Manager GUI:

(--> "Servers and VMs": select the server on the tree under "server pools" --> change the dropdown to "info")

How to fix a UUID change can be found here:
https://hadafq8.wordpress.com/2016/03/22/oracleovmovm-server-uuid-challenges/