Friday 13 April 2012

A techie post… finally I hear you say…

I agree, there have not been enough techie posts of late.  I’ve been on my soap box, talking about things that don’t really solve peoples oracle problems.  That is going to change (for this post anyway).

I’ve been using OATS (Oracle Application Testing Suite) quite a bit lately.  I also got my hands on a loan fusionIO card.  I had lots of fun with all of the technology, OVM, OEL, FusionIO, templates, JDE 9.1 etc etc.  But…  My white paper did not contain any real salient results.  Sure there was a lot of learning and we upgraded every piece of software around our OVM software.  We could not get the disks humming on the guests – damn.

Since then I’ve had some advice from an oracle guy, who will remain nameless in this forum:

  • img files will be much, much slower than native access. Present the entire block device to the guest (bit hard when OVM can’t see the FusionIO disks)…
  • LVM is also completely unsupported on OVM3 and will introduce massive bottlenecks, as it doesn't support block barriers. You should've just formatted the entire device with OCFS2 in local, vmstore mode if you want to use .img files. However, I would recommend again just presenting the entire device to the guest.  (Hmm he got me here)
  • try HVM with PV Drivers and PCI passthrough to actually present the entire fusionIO card natively to a guest

These are all good things to try.  I hate chucking away 120 hours of hard work and not get a result, but that is the way things go sometimes.

Anyway, I seem to be drifting again.

My technical point was going to be OATS and tools release 9.1.  I kept getting errors with my 9.1 load testing using OATS.

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Errors are listed in the above shot, “Failed to solve variable web.framesrc.RunAppHiddenIframe using path”  blah blah.  SOOOO frustrating!  The script would record fine in openscript, but then would not playback.

I got in contact with my VERY friendly and super helpful oracle pals who put me in contact with the right people the first time (you know who you are).  The very simple solution is (verbatim): 

“Going forward, prior to recording in your OpenScript screen please navigate to View >OpenScript Preferences > Record > HTTP and choose Record mode as ‘HTTP’ and click apply and then start recording.”

This will apply to all recording going forward, but it works…  Scripts record first time every time in JD Edwards 9.1.  Playback works and load testing works!

I also hope that I’m not bursting anyone’s bubble here, but I also got a scoop about JDE and OATS support in the future… “OATS 12.1 which is the next release has a separate protocol for “Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne” load testing and has a custom made correlation library for JDE that we developed as part of the tool. This will help you to handle JDE specific correlation issues.”  That is very cool!

4 comments:

Randall Whiteman said...

Hi Shannon, have you got OATS to work on a JDE standalone instance or do you know/think it's possible? I really want to test out the functionality but it will be a while before the techie guys at work get all their ducks in line and install the thing. Cheers, Randall.

Shannon Moir said...

Hi Randall, thanks for the interest in the subject matter, I've not seen you on site for 10 years I guess! In relation to your question, there is no reason why OATS would not work with stand alone JDE. There might be some changes that you need to make to ensure that the local web is not referenced as "localhost" in the URL, otherwise you'll struggle on the install of OATS and JDE on one machine (this is due to conflicting uses of local XE database). At the end of the day, OATS is a pretty simple (HTTP in and HTTP out) application.

Randall Whiteman said...

Yeah it's been a while :-)
You were (not surprisingly) correct. I got OATS installed and working but JDE Standalone no longer works (Security server errors on starting the thick client). Are there any simple fixes you can suggest to get the two to play nicely? With my limited understanding I tried playing with the JDE.INI and JDBJ.INI settings. If it's not that simple I will scrap both and reinstall JDE Standalone.

Shannon Moir said...

Hey Randall. There are a lot of limitations with XE, when it's broken for me I've not looked into a solution. I take it on the chin and move on... Next time it happens I might look into it more. I suggest two separate VMs. Load them up on your local machine using "windows virtual PC" - that's how I roll.