 This is the second post in a series about leveraging virtualization for the purpose of hosting an Agile PLM environment. Given my need to work with the latest Agile PLM release (9.3.0.2), I thought I would make some screencasts to demonstrate how I set it up and how virtualization can help out your organization. The first post "Going Virtual with Agile PLM… Don’t Be Scared (Part 1)" provided a series overview and included the first screencast on how to create a virtual machine template of Windows Server 2008 SP1.
This post walks you through the provisioning of a virtual machine from the template created in Part 1. Templates are not required but if you ever have to create more than one virtual machine you can certainly save a lot of time by just cloning that first install to a template and then provisioning new VMs from it when required. In addition to provisioning the VM, we will also prepare the host for our Agile PLM installation.
Keep in mind I am installing this virtual machine for testing and development purposes. We do a lot of Agile Engineering Collaboration work as well as custom development against Agile. The settings I choose may not be appropriate for your environment.
Provisioning the Virtual Machine
It is incredibly easy to provision a virtual machine in VMware. Here are the steps:
- Using vCenter in the "Inventory > VMs and Templates" view, simply right click on the template and select Deploy new Virtual Machine from this Template.
- A wizard will open, enter a name for the virtual machine and the inventory location (the logical placement of the VM). At Zero Wait-State we have the standard of prefixing our virtual machine names with vm- and try to name the actual vm the same as the hostname at the operating system level. Because this is an Agile PLM 9.3.0.2 installation, I used the name vm-agile9302.
- Next, select the hostname and the datastore
- For our virtual machines, we chose thin provisioning. In the setup of our template, we did the same so we will use "same format as source"
- On the last page of the wizard, I elect to edit the virtual hardware to add a hard disk and bump up the RAM. As expected, I use thin provisioning on the disk.
- Once you are done with the wizard it may take a few minutes to provision but it is definitely faster than installing Windows again.
Preparing the Virtual Machine
Now that the VM is ready to work with there are a few things we need to do:
- TAKE NOTES!!! I always put the administrator username and password in the VM notes section. Even though we maintain an internal assets list of machines and information, it is a huge time saver to have it where you need it. In addition logins on our development and demo boxes rarely change so maintaining it in two places is not a big deal. I also elected to use a static IP address on this VM, something I normally do not do. Usually the loopback connector gets installed and VM uses DHCP, however I elected to use a static IP and also threw that in the notes.
- In the VM, I assigned the static IP and set the administrator password to never expires.
- The new volume was created on the drive added in step 5 above
- The installers for the Oracle stack and Agile PLM were copied over
- A SNAPSHOT was taken -- if you're using VMware, use VMware (in otherwords, take advantage of its features)
Here is Part 2: Provisioning and Preparing the VM, enjoy! (Opens a new window)
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