E-Business Suite Release 12.1.1 - It is working!

Yesterday morning I started my installation of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.1. I was very impressed by the installation, even though I performed the installation on a VMware guest Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.3, running with only 1.5GB of memory, from my external USB disk. Installation started around 8:15am and finished around 12:45pm: 4.5 hours. Not bad for an installation on an external USB drive...

I simultaneously discovered the solution to an issue with the R12 Webserver in combination with OCFS2 I reported upon about two years ago in one of my articles on the AMIS Technology Blog. I didn't realize it until I found out that, against my expectations, after the installation, surprisingly the webtier started without problems. I thought of two possible causes for this:

1. OCFS2 has improved, or
2. The new version of the Oracle Internet Application Server (10.1.3.4) has improved.

Neither of the two turned out to be the case:

During the Rapid Install I (to be honest, accidentally) configured the Instance Home ($INST_TOP) on one of my local file systems. The Instance Home contains the E-Business Suite Instance specific configuration files, log files and other files that are specific to its particular instance. Therefore, this Instance Home doesn't require to be shared. There is nothing wrong putting it on a local file system.
Now, when defining the Instance Home to a local file system, also brings the location where the Apache Web Server wants to create this particular file ($INST_TOP/logs/ora/10.1.3/Apache/mm.XXXX) to the local file system. No need for symbolic links or whatsoever.

In my next article I will be discussing some of the new technological features of R12.1.1.