How to extract Oracle E-Business Suite OVM Templates to use on regular Linux

So if you're like me and can't wait to build your own E-Business Suite install fully from disks, why not use Oracle's ?

It's difficult because Oracle release them as large quantities of zip files, in an OVM-only format.

So I decided to try and extract them.

First thing to do is to download all the zip files from edelivery.oracle.com

( this is for 12.2.6 Vision )

rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4149895254 Jun 25 08:52 V861124-01_1of2.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4161834659 Jun 25 08:53 V861124-01_2of2.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4022878516 Jun 25 08:53 V861125-01_2of2.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4167947454 Jun 25 08:53 V861126-01_2of2.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4210862906 Jun 25 08:53 V861125-01_1of2.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4039052808 Jun 25 08:54 V861126-01_1of2.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 3982516324 Jun 25 08:58 V861127-01_1of2.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4085427663 Jun 25 09:00 V861127-01_2of2.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4181580260 Jun 25 09:00 V861129-01_1of2.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4223529093 Jun 25 09:00 V861128-01_2of2.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4231089650 Jun 25 09:01 V861128-01_1of2.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4052472122 Jun 25 09:07 V861130-01_1of2.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4113458555 Jun 25 09:07 V861129-01_2of2.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 3915350219 Jun 25 09:08 V861131-01_1of2.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 3971929518 Jun 25 09:08 V861130-01_2of2.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4180779762 Jun 25 09:08 V861131-01_2of2.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  409489464 Jun 25 09:09 V861133-01.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4194429288 Jun 25 09:13 V861132-01_1of2.zip
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4225432547 Jun 25 09:16 V861132-01_2of2.zip

( whoa that's a lot ). 

Now download the assemble.sh file from Metalink  ( see Appendix A Note 2254565.1 ) 

This takes an hour or so and then 

This will give you a very large file 


-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 77706019328 Jun 25 10:20 Oracle-E-Business-Suite-12.2.6_VISION_INSTALL.ova

So what do you do with this ? 

well OVA is a tarfile really so 

tar -xvf and then we get 

-rw-------. 1 root root       11351 Apr 20 16:13 Oracle-E-Business-Suite-12.2.6_VISION_INSTALL.ovf

-rw-------. 1 root root 77706006528 Jun 26 12:18 Oracle-E-Business-Suite-12.2.6_VISION_INSTALL-disk001.vmdk

the VMDK is where everything is, in the portable disk image. 

So we need to get access to that. 

download the VMWARE VDDK Version 5 ( Google it ) as this allows Linux to mount these types of images 

Essentially we need to do the following now 

1.  Mount the vmdk as a flat image as Linux can't handle loopback multiparts properly 

2.  take the partition (2) via counting the 512 block offsets as the disk image we want and then mount that as a loopback 

3.  vgscan that mounted loopback 

4.  varyon the lv on the discovered PV 

5.  fsck the lv as the image was shutdown dirty, and the journal needs playback ( sigh ) 

6.  mount the LV to a mount point

et voila ! 

Most of the above is straightforward except amazingly point 5 which I just could not get to work, until some research seemed to indicate it might be a UEK issue, so switched to RHCK , tried again,  fsck went through first go, and the filesystem mounted ! 

So now we can access the files in the appliance 

( All thanks to THIS Link http://www.bokko.nl/vmware-linux-vmdk-file-mount-from-linux-host-with-lvm-filesystems/ ) which gave me most of the clues for points 1..4 

Thanks for reading, you've been great