Before doing the integration of Oracle Application Express (APEX) with E-Business Suite (EBs) you need to have both environments installed. The Oracle white paper talks about the installation of APEX, but not about installing E-Business Suite.The white paper states; the prerequisites for the solution given are:Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3 or above
Oracle E-Business Suite Patch 12316083
Oracle Database 10.2.0.3 or above
Oracle Application Express 3.2 or above
The first thing I needed was an E-Busisness Suite environment. Oracle provides some VM Templates for E-Business Suite 12.1.3. I wanted a complete demo system, like for example the HR schema in the Oracle database or the Sample Application in APEX. The VM Template for E-Business Suite includes the Vision demo. I never installed EBs before, so I did some research how to do that. Finally I didn't proceed with installing E-Business Suite on our servers, as MCX was happy to provide us with a complete Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3 Vision installation on their servers. The version of the underlying Oracle database is 11.2.0.2.0. I also asked them to apply patch 12316083.APEX needs to be installed on the same Oracle database as the Oracle E- Business suite database server.We went with installing the latest version of APEX at the moment: APEX 4.1.Installing APEX is not that hard, basically running some scripts. The only bit you have to be careful with is the choice of web listener. APEX supports three web listeners: mod_plsql, EPG and the APEX Listener.The mod_plsql gateway is disabled by default by EBs R12, so you shouldn't go with that. The EPG is not recommended either as it will add additional load on the database server, so the best choice would be the APEX Listener. The APEX Listener is the recommended choice in any circumstance anyway, regardless of EBs. (on a related note; I'm giving a presentation about my experiences moving to the APEX Listener at OGh and ODTUG.)So after installing APEX and using the APEX Listener on an EBs configuration, the architecture looks like this:So now all the prerequisites are met and we can concentrate on the real integration part in the next post.Previous related posts:APEX and E-Business Suite integration
VMWare ESXi, VSphere (the overall platform) and VCenter (the management server, used when there's >1 ESXi host you want to run services on) is the most impressive part of the setup, though. As ESXi is a bare-metal hypervisor (like Oracle's own Oracle VM), there's little of the OS overhead that you get when running VMs on a regular server or desktop, plus you can take advantage of features like VMotion (for high-availability of VMs when their files are stored on shared storage), host-to-host migration and so on. In the two screenshots of VMWare VCenter Console below, you can see on the left, the set of VMs currently assigned to the larger of the two servers, with the graphs down the right-hand side showing the profile of CPU and RAM usage; whilst on the right, details of one of the VMs, in this case running Oracle Linux and E-Business Suite 12.1.3.
Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3 Templates, Deploying Over VirtualBox Using Oracle VM Server VM Manage
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