Installation of Oracle IDM 11g R2 PS2 using the new Automated Deployment Tool

This post describes how to use the brand new Deployment Tool for Oracle IDM 11g R2 which automates the installation and configuration of specific Oracle IDAM for evaluation purposes. I have used installation of Oracle Identity Manager 11g R2 PS2 as a use case to demonstrate usage of the Automated Deployment Tool. One can also install Oracle Access Manager in a standalone mode or in an integrated fashion with OIM with the help of this tool.

To make things easier and more organized, the whole process is split up into multiple documents and their links are available at the end of this post.

Little bit about the process, experience and benefits

The steps in the documents have been distilled from a ‘sea’ of information from Oracle’s official documentation which I must say is very comprehensive and thorough. The official document says that this repository deployment installer is supposed to be for test/evaluation environments but the way it explains and outlines the whole process makes it equivalent for full blown production setup.

The Oracle guide provides recommendations on numerous other facets such as HA, topology, architectural nitty gritties, specific DB requirements etc. These should be considered if your use case matches the one in the documentation. Otherwise, one can go ahead, use the basic skeleton from this post and go ahead with the deployment

Warning: DO NOT assume that the installation via this process is less time consuming.

Even if we consider a simple use case for OIM installation, the overall procedure is time consuming – at least for the first time. Why??

• As stated earlier, going through the ‘sea’ of documentation, best practices, recommendations can be extremely intimidating – even for an ‘experienced’ campaigner
• Getting a feel of the overall process and trying out things – sometimes things might go wrong or unexpected events might occur when dealing with something new – this can set you back on some time
• The individual processes will take time (depending upon your OS horsepower).

But rest assured that 80% of the installation is automated.  Once we are aware of the pitfalls, and have a decent overview of the process and steps for our use case, the overall deployment should be pretty easy.

So how can this new tool benefit us?

• The overall process is split into 7-8 steps which are clear and concise
• Least possible manual intervention except for  prerequisites and requirements compliance which would be known in advance
• Process is less error prone once prerequisites are identified and the topology and overall structure of our required deployment infra is decided
• No more installing individual components like weblogic, jdk, oim, soa, executing weblogic configuration for OIM, dreaded DB security store configuration . . etc etc – jus sit back and execute simple commands

Before you jump into this a quick note regarding the overall time taken – a little over 3 hours (most of which was spent passively i.e. waiting on the automated processes to complete)

Enough blabber . . . here are the links to the documents

Link to installation document

Have fun . . . because that’s what matters at the end 🙂