Steven Chan just published a great blog entry that talks about the release of a new set of Oracle VM templates.

Oracle Ebusiness Suite 12.1.3.

You can find the blog post here.

Templates are available for:

E-Business Suite 12.1.3 Vision (64-bit)

E-Business Suite 12.1.3 Production (32-bit)

E-Business Suite 12.x Sparse Middle Tiers (32-bit and 64-bit)

Thanks Steven!

Why does this stuff matter? Well, in general, virtualization (or cloud) solutions provide an easy way to create Virtual Machines. Whether it's through a "cloud api" or just a virtualization API. But all you end up with, in the end, is still just a Virtual Machine... Maybe with an OS pre-installed/pre-configured. So you have flexibility of moving VMs around and providing a VM but what about the actual applications (anything more than a very basic app)?

The application administrator then still has to go and install and configure the OS for that application and install the application and its patches and basic configuration so that the application user then can go in. Building gold images for complex software stacks that are not owned by the users/admins is always very difficult.

With our templates, we provide a number of things :

Oracle Linux pre-installed and pre-configured with the minimum required packages for that application to run. (so it's secure)

Oracle Linux can be distributed and used for free or with a support subscription. There is no trial license, there is no registration key, no alpha version or community version versus enterprise version. You get what we provide in our engineered systems, what we provide support for, without change. Supported out of the box. No virtual Trial appliances, no prototypes, no POC. What you download is production ready without change.

The applications are installed by the developers of the application. The database team builds database templates, the applications engineering team builds applications templates. The first boot/configuration scripts ask for the basic information such as hostname, ip address, user passwords and then go off and set everything up correctly.

All tested together -> application -> operating system -> hypervisor. not 3 (or more) products from 3(or more) different companies.