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Running APEX on 11gR2 using Sun's (Oracle's?) VirtualBox

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Today I decided that I needed an environment to play with the latest and greatest Oracle RDBMS : 11gR2. This version is only available for Unix platforms, so I needed a virtual environment to get that working on my laptop - running on XP.
You can pick any kind of virtualization software, but, due to the recent take-over of Sun by Oracle, I decided to go for what's currently known as Sun's VirtualBox. I guess this product will re-branded to Oracle's VirtualBox somewhere soon.
So what are the steps:

1. Download VirtualBox from http://www.virtualbox.org/ and run the installer.

2. Start VirtualBox, click 'New' and enter a Name, Operating and Version for the Virtual machine. This is gonna be a 100% Oracle thing, so I installed Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL).

3. Oracle 11gR2 needs 1Gb of RAM, so set the memory size to 1024 - you can change this afterwards.

4. Create a new boot harddisk with dynamically expanding storage.









5. On the next page you have to set the 'size of the virtual hard disk'. This is not the initial size, but the maximum to which the harddisk can be expanded. So don't take it too small, because adding or expanding a hard disk to a current installation is not so easy...(as I have experienced).














6. Next start the VM and install OEL from a DVD or ISO download. I installed it with all defaults, with support for Software Development and Webserver. Honestly I have no idea what is added by checking these features, but I checked it just because that's what I want to use it for.

7. Now take a break - or do something else - while OEL is being installed... it takes a while.










8. After installation you have to configure OEL. You can accept all defaults, I just changed the settings for the Firewall to accept HTTP request on port 8080 - the one we're going to use for running APEX.













9. Next add a Shared Folder in VirtualBox - a folder that can be used by both the host and the guest OS. To use it within the Linux environment: login as root, mount the VBoxGuestAdditons.iso (by pressing the Host-D key, whereby Host is the right Ctrl key by default), copy VBoxLinuxAddtions-x86.run to the Desktop and run it. Restart the VM when that's finished.

10. Mount the added shared drive: sudo mount -t vboxsf Shared /media/shared






11. In the Host OS: Download the two 11gR2 disks, copy them to c:\shared, unzip them - of course you can do that in the Guest system also, but not while you're installing it ;-). Install 11gR2 on the Guest OS following the steps in the documentation. Again some time for a good cup of coffee....









12. 11gR2 is shipped with APEX, so it just takes two steps to get it running:
Open up the EPG using port 8080 : Start SQLPlus, login as SYS, exec dbms_xdb.sethttpport(8080) and set a password for the APEX Admin user by executing the apxchpwd script (located in /home/oracle/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1/apex for a default installation). Now you can open up the browser, navigate to http://localhost:8080/apex/apex_admin and off you go.

13. Now where almost there...because now we want to use the database in the VM from the browser in the Host OS. Therefore we need to set up Port Forwarding in VirtualBox. Shutdown the Guest VM and VirtualBox. Run these three commands:
vboxmanage setextradata OEL "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/Apex/HostPort" 8080
vboxmanage setextradata OEL "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/Apex/GuestPort" 8080
vboxmanage setextradata OEL "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/Apex/Protocol" TCP
Startup VirtualBox and the VM. If the database doesn't start, login as the oracle user, set the environment (. /usr/local/bin/oraenv), start the listener (lsnrctl start) and start the database (sqlplus sys as sysdba and enter 'startup').
Now we can use the APEX on Oracle 11gR2 in a Oracle Enterprise Linux VirtualBox from an XP Host OS. And it runs very fast....!!

One final remark: If you've got an Oracle instance running on your Host OS, http://localhost:8080/apex will open up the login page from your Host. So you either have to shut that down, or forward another HostPort (like 8081).
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Comments

Christian Rokitta ♠ said…
Hi Roel,

“… it runs very fast....!!”
Could you give me some specs on your host system, so I can compare it to mine? Just to decide if it’s worthwhile to try an installation with VirtualBox on my laptop. I already have successfully configured a VirtualBox with XP and XE database and Apex which performed reasonably.

Regards,
Christian
10:30 am
Roel said…
Hi Christian

I am running it on a Lenovo Thinkpas T61 with XP-SP2. 2 CPU's 2Gb RAM.
I assigned 1CPU an 1Gb of RAM to the VM.

Roel
11:14 am
Mark Lancaster said…
Nice post Roel.

I'll give it a go this weekend.

Mark
2:07 pm
Marco said…
Need to toss in my kudos and support for VirtualBox as well. Been using it for a year, with more satisfaction than VMWare (mostly due to its simplicity and stability).

Hope Oracle continues Sun's good work.

Marco
10:39 pm
Martin D'Souza said…
Hi Roel,

Thanks for the excellent post. Just some install notes that I had to go through that may be helpful to others:

Virtual Box: I changed the network settings to "Bridged Network" so that I could Putty/SSH into the machine to do Linux updates

Missing Packages. When I went to install some packages were missing. I had to update the YUM repository. The following article helped out a lot: http://thuannvn.blogspot.com/2009/06/yum-repository-setup-by-oracle.html

# cd /etc/yum.repos.d
# wget http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-el5.repo


Enable the appropriate repository by editing the yum configuration file

* Open the yum configuration file in a text editor
* Locate the section in the file for the repository you plan to update from, e.g. [el4_u6_base]
* Change enabled=0 to enabled=1
3:24 pm
Martin D'Souza said…
Hi Roel,

Thought this might help other users for the Oracle Installation instructions: http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/smiley-11gr1-install.html

Martin
9:30 pm
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