Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Quickly create a Virtualbox development VM with XE DB using Kickstart, Packer, Vagrant

The topic of quickly creating an Oracle development VM is not new. Several years ago Edwin Biemond and Lucas Jellema have written several blogs about this and have given presentations about the topics at various conferences. You can also download ready made Virtualbox images from Oracle here and specifically for SOA Suite here.

Over the years I have created a lot (probably 100+) of virtual machines manually. For SOA Suite, the process of installing the OS, installing the database, installing WebLogic Server, installing SOA Suite itself can be quite time consuming and boring if you have already done it so many times. Finally my irritation has passed the threshold that I need to automate it! I wanted easily recreate a clean environment with a new version of specific software. This blog is a start; provisioning an OS and installing the XE database on it. It might seem a lot but this blog contains the knowledge of two days work. This indicates it is relatively easy to get started with these things.

I decided to start from scratch and first create a base Vagrant box using Packer which uses Kickstart. Kickstart is used to configure the OS of the VM such as disk partitioning scheme, root password and initial packages. Packer makes using Kickstart easy and allows easy creation of a Vagrant base box. After the base Vagrant box was created, I can use Vagrant to create the Virtualbox machine, configure it and do additional provisioning such as in this case installing the Oracle XE database.