Provisioning is an important solution offered as a part of Lifecycle Management that enables you to provision middleware artifacts such as WebLogic Domain and Java EE Applications.

To manage these Deployment Procedures and Profiles effectively in Enterprise Manager there is a centralised middleware provisioning page which exposes all the features relevant to Middleware Provisioning like creating, viewing, and provisioning profiles and deployment procedures. To access this page, from Enterprise menu, select Provisioning and Patching, then click Middleware Provisioning.

In addition to accessing all the relevant provisioning related features from Middleware Provisioning page, you can also launch some of them from the target menu. To do so, from Targets menu, select Middleware. Select a target of type domain, and select Provisioning, and the options in this menu allow you to create provisioning profile based on WebLogic Domain or Oracle Home.

Provisioning is an important solution offered as a part of Lifecycle Management that enables you to provision middleware artifacts such as WebLogic Domain or Oracle Home.

To manage these Deployment Procedures and Profiles effectively in Enterprise Manager there is a centralized middleware provisioning page which exposes all the features relevant to Middleware Provisioning like creating, viewing, and provisioning profiles and deployment procedures. To access this page, from Enterprise menu, select Provisioning and Patching, then click Middleware Provisioning.

In addition to access provisioning features from Middleware Provisioning page, you can also launch them from the target menu. To do so, from Targets menu, select Middleware. Select a target of type domain, and select Provisioning, and the options in this menu allow you to create provisioning profile based on WebLogic Domain or Oracle Home.

The Middleware Provisioning page is categorized into the following sections:

• Profiles

• Deployment Procedures

Profiles

The profiles section lists all the provisioning profiles that you have created and the profiles on which you have been granted access. No profiles are shipped out of the box. You have to create your own profiles based on the provisioning needs. You can:

• Click the profile to view the profile details.

• Filter the profile based on what you want to display in the Profiles table. To do so, from View menu, select Show Profiles, then click the option that you want to display. For example, if you click All, then all the profiles are displayed.

• To clone a WebLogic Domain or an Oracle Home, select a profile and click Provision.

• To create a new profile, select an option from the Create menu.

• To delete an existing profile, select the profile name, and click Delete.

• To create a new partition in an existing domain, select the appropriate profile (i.e. a profile that was created either by exporting an older domain or by exporting a partition) and click Import Partition.

Deployment Procedures

The deployment procedures section lists all the Oracle-provided deployment procedures, the Custom Deployment Procedures (CDP) that you have created, and the procedures on which you (the administrator you have logged in as) have been granted access. Select a deployment procedure from the list, and perform any of the following action on it:

• To run a deployment procedure, select the procedure, and click Launch.

• To create a copy of an Oracle-supplied deployment procedure, click Create Like.

• To delete a User-owned deployment procedure, select the procedure, and click Delete. Note that, you can not delete Oracle-provided procedures.

• To edit a deployment procedure, select the procedure and click Edit.

  Note: You can not edit Oracle-supplied procedures. If you want to edit a procedure, you must first clone an Oracle-supplied procedure using the Create Like option. You can now edit the newly cloned procedure that you own. To do so, click Edit.

• To grant other administrators, for example: EM_PROVISIONING_OPERATOR role, access on a particular deployment procedure, click Edit Permissions.

The definitions of terms listed in this section are useful in helping to understand the Middleware concepts presented in this part:

• WebLogic Domain: A WebLogic Domain is a logically related group of Java components. A domain includes a special WebLogic Server instance called the Administration Server, which is the central point from which you configure and manage all resources in the domain. Usually, you configure a domain to include additional WebLogic Server instances called Managed Servers. You deploy Java components, such as Web applications, EJBs, and Web services, and other resources, to the Managed Servers and use the Administration Server for configuration and management purposes only.

• Administration Server: The Administration Server operates as the central control entity for the configuration of the entire domain. It maintains the domain's configuration documents and distributes changes in the configuration documents to managed servers. The Administration Server is the central location from where you can monitor all the resources in a domain. Each WebLogic Server domain must have one server instance that acts as the Administration Server.

• Managed Server: Managed servers host business applications, application components, Web services, and their associated resources. To optimize performance, managed servers maintain a read-only copy of the domain's configuration and security document. When a managed server starts up, it connects to the domain's Administration Server to synchronize its configuration document with the document that the Administration Server maintains.

• Node Manager: Node Manager is a Java utility that runs as a separate process from Oracle WebLogic Server and allows you to perform common operations for a Managed Server, regardless of its location with respect to its Administration Server. While use of Node Manager is optional, it provides valuable benefits if your Oracle WebLogic Server environment hosts applications with high-availability requirements.

  If you run Node Manager on a computer that hosts Managed Servers, you can start and stop the Managed Servers remotely using the Administration Console, Fusion Middleware Control, or the command line. Node Manager can also automatically restart a Managed Server after an unexpected failure.

• WebLogic Server Home: A WebLogic Server home contains installed files necessary to host a WebLogic Server. The WebLogic Server home directory is a peer of Oracle home directories and resides within the directory structure of the Middleware home.

• Oracle Home: An Oracle home contains installed files necessary to host a specific product. For example, the SOA Oracle home contains a directory that contains binary and library files for Oracle SOA Suite. An Oracle home resides within the directory structure of the Middleware home.

• Cloning: The process of creating a copy of the WebLogic Domain and the Oracle home binaries present within the domain is referred to as cloning. Typically, cloning is performed at the WebLogic Domain-level. Fusion Middleware Domain cloning can be performed from an existing target or using provisioning profiles.

• Provisioning Profiles: A profile is a snapshot of a live WebLogic Domain or Oracle Home, or it can simply contain a set of installation media archives pertaining to the product suite. A profile can be created from the Cloud Control or using Enterprise Manager Command Line Interface or through REST APIs.

• Gold Image: The gold image is a single image that includes the binary and library files for an Oracle home.

  For Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c, there is no concept of Middleware Home. Infact, the Middleware Home itself functions as the Oracle Home, and middleware products like SOA, Service Bus, are installed within this folder directly. For example:

  [user1@<agent host name> OH12JRF]$ ls
  OPatch  cfgtoollogs  crs  em   install    jdeveloper  ldap  mft      nls  oep  oraInst.loc    oracore  oui   plsql    rdbms    root.sh.old    root.sh.old.2  soa      srvm     wlserver
  bin     coherence    css  has  inventory  jlib        lib   network  odi  ohs  oracle_common  osb      perl  precomp  root.sh  root.sh.old.1  slax           sqlplus  webgate  xdk
  

• Scaling Up: When a managed server is added or cloned to a host that already exists in the domain or cluster.

• Scaling Out: When a managed server is added or cloned to a host that is not present in the domain or cluster.