Oracle WebLogic Server on Azure Virtual Machines major release now available
Published date: September 22, 2020
We are announcing the availability of a major release for solutions to run Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS) on Azure Linux virtual machines. Jointly developed with the WebLogic team as part of the broad ranging partnership between Microsoft and Oracle, these solutions are targeted to enable lift-and-shift migration of mission critical enterprise Java workloads.
The first release of these solutions announced at Oracle OpenWorld in September 2019 covered common WLS on Azure deployment use cases such as base image, single working instance and clustering. The solutions automate boilerplate operations such as provisioning virtual networks/storage, installing Linux/Java resources, setting up WLS as well as configuring security with a network security group. The initial release supported a limited set of WLS and Java versions.
This release expands the options for operating systems and Oracle JDK and WLS combinations (see figure 1). The release also enables automatic provisioning and integration of Azure App Gateway with a WLS cluster (see figure 2). In addition, automating integration with a variety of databases on Azure and the Oracle Cloud is now enabled (see figure 3). Lastly, this release enables automated integration with Azure Active Directory via LDAP (see figure 4).
A subsequent release by the end of calendar year 2020 will deliver distributed logging via Elastic Stack as well as distributed caching via Oracle Coherence. Oracle and Microsoft are also working on enabling similar capabilities on the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) using the WebLogic Kubernetes Operator.
More details on these solutions are available here. You are encouraged to evaluate these solutions for full production usage and provide feedback.