OC4J Standalone + iAS enterprise manager?

Question

Hello everyone
We have recently been looking into OC4J standalone as a possible solution to our particular installation. We have an installation of iAS 10g2 which is configured so that each of our clients have their own environments; we mostly deal with legacy forms and reports. Each client has their own form listener, config files, report directories, etc. This is fine for our purposes.
The issue is with deploying applications in OC4Js. We could create an OC4J per client in iAS, but they would still all need the ias_admin password to deploy apps either through enterprise manager or JDeveloper. This is not desirable and is not going to happen.
With standalone OC4J we can have one per client, each with their different settings and passwords. Network ports are different for each client which is a bit troublesome but not a deal breaker. The big issue is with monitoring.
Is there any way to have the iAS 10g EM console include standalone OC4Js? Is there a way to do it from Grid Control?
Would appreciate any advice you may have.

Answer 1

There is recent a thread on here about how people have approached adding additional users over and above ias_admin for the purposes of managing EM. I haven't looked closely at the solutions yet, but I suspect that even by simply adding a new user as they are doing, the privileges the new user has will be the same as the ias_admin user -- in 10.1.2 (R2) and earlier it was a very coarse permission model.
And there's no support for managing OC4J standalone instances via EM or GC in R2.
What sort of applications are you deploying -- you mention forms and reports and in that regard you are restricted to R2. But if you are "deploying" custom Java applications, then using 10.1.3 (ie R3) may be an option -- in which case there are several things that may be of interest.
1. We've added support for a finer grained management model. You can create new users with a smaller set of administrative privileges -- all, deploy-apps, monitor. So you can create a cluster of servers, each with OC4J instances and users can login with their specified username and perform the tasks they have been assigned. It's not ideal since the permissions are relatively coarse (all, deploy apps, read/monitor) but its better than what was in 10.1.3.
2. If you wanted to pursue the standalone instance route, then with 10.1.3, each instance does actually embed EM, so it can be managed from a browser. With the pure standalone instances, you can't really collect them into a cluster -- each one is purely a standalone instance, but it now has its own EM console. However we have added an installation option to lay down what is essentially an OPMN managed standalone instance -- in which case you get the OPMN management layer around OC4J standalone, which in turn allows them to be collected into a cluster -- so you have a single point of management access for all the Oc4J instances. Again you could create an per instance user so that each user can only log into their own specific OC4J instance -- one thing to keep in mind that each instance does need the same global user provisioned to allow EM to operate correctly. But you can create additional users on an instance basis at will.
Again, all these things are in the 10.1.3 R3 release -- which if you are purely working with forms and reports won't help you. If you are deploying custom Java applications, then this is something you could investigate.
-steve-