WebLogic Suite Reviews

I use the tool for hosting.

I am satisfied with the product. The product is reliable. We can depend on it.

A supplier installed the solution. They were managing the solution, and then the contract ended. Then, we faced issues because we did not get the necessary training to use the solution. I had to train myself to use the product. The product is not easy to use if we do not have proper training.

I have been using the solution since 2016.

The tool is very stable.

The tool is scalable.

The support is not good. In countries where Oracle is not available, Oracle gives licenses to third-party companies to sell their product. They are called FDPs. Oracle does not make sure that the FDP engineers are competitive and that they can handle things. Most of the time, we need to raise SRs to Oracle. I don't think the model I'm using works well because I have to raise SRs with Oracle repeatedly.

It would be better if the FDP engineers were skilled. Even if we have a service level agreement with them, we do everything ourselves. That is the reason I ended up doing a lot of things myself. I read a lot of things and trained myself. We cannot rely on FDPs.

Neutral

I have used Microsoft most of my life.

I'm running the tool from Oracle Private Cloud Appliance. Since I have some training, I can easily deploy the solution.

We pay for Oracle Premier Support. The product comes bundled with Oracle Premier Support.

People who want to use the solution must research the tool and get trained to benefit from it. I am not familiar with all of the features of the product yet. I do not know whether the solution is platform-dependent or platform-independent. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Ease of scalability through both assymetric and symmetric clustering; ease of integration with existing and potential future Oracle product technologies; leverages many industry-standard technologies for application support (JSON, REST, SOA, JavaBeans, J2EE; continues to evolve towards a fully-integrated solution designed to front-end enterprise applications whether related to transactional websites, dynamic content management solutions, or acting as an intermediary service provider between other web/URI data sources.

Provides a uniform technology platform between multiple application installations, whether Enterprise Resource Planning or Customer Relationship Management (ERP/CRM) based systems, Imaging ingestion and integration, or document content management. Administration techniques are consistent with only minor UI changes between versions, providing relatively seamless upgrade integration for future deployments and upgrade of the web platform.

Cloning and replication (detailed below) could be much more flexible and standardized. WebLogic out-of-the-box installations are only templated and automated for Oracle-packaged applications. For independent installations, answering the myriad WebLogic setup parameters can be quite confusing as to what are the correct parameters, other than the defaults (some of which are not provided.)

While many seasoned DBAs like to attribute how Oracle's 3-click Weblogic "Typical Install" type is easy-peasy, what doesn't meet the road requirements is that 90% of current WLS installs are to support purchased Oracle applications (OBIEE, EBS, SOA Suite, Identity and Access Management, etc.) and not the historic period of when companies bought BEA as an enterprise alternative to Apache.

The OUI templates that come with the packaged applications tend to whizz you through the 27+ pages of the "Custom Install" without guidance as to why you're picking certain options, nor why you should or should not select different options. With most WLS build settings, you can't go back and reconfigure an existing setup once deployed. For example, even though it's the same WLS engine used, I cannot change an EBS configured WLS to run as a SOA Suite shared install. I have to do it again as a separate installation.

Costs customers money and time. Works, yes, but less than efficient.

Installations first went live in 1998 with version 9.x (originally packaged as BEA WebLogic through IBM) supporting Maximo (Enterprise Asset Mgt) and Cognos (BI) and have continued post-Oracle acquisition to support eBusiness Suite R12.2 and Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c.

Generally the only major concerns involve legacy Operating System desupport which has occurred over the years. Platform migrations have been planned ahead of each lifecycle change in order to mitigate application availability issues. Since the binaries between OS's are not compatible, we do have to exercise some level of re-implementation each time a platform (hardware or software) change forces such migration.

Weblogic tends to be extremely stable once appropriate memory and CPU requirements have been determined for a particular application under production load conditions. When given insufficient resources, like any web application platform, we have had our share of out-of-memory errors or exhausting a Java virtual machine's capacity.

Being extremely scalable is one of WebLogic's best features. If you anticipate dramatic upward changes in capacity, one of Oracle's Universal License Agreements might be the best approach as it decouples the CPU-based license costs from the costs to scale. In our case, we often use the same WebLogic servers for multiple applications to reduce overall licensing and maintenance costs. As long as the application is compatible with a particular version, they can co-reside (multi-tenant) on the same WebLogic cluster, keeping in mind that the additional CPU and memory resources need to be accommodated.

Service with Oracle tends to be directly related to your amount of new product purchasing. This can be a disadvantage to mature and stable installations that don't tend to expand much (i.e. don't expect weekly follow-up calls.) A significant improvement will be experienced by customers who adopt one of Oracle's emerging technology products (such as Cloud-based WebLogic Services) wherein the success of your implementation often becomes the next customer reference for Oracle. That doesn't last forever, but it's nice to experience during the often rocky start-up stages of new technologies.

My Oracle Support takes a little getting used to for new customers used to more narrowly focused technology vendors. The vast number of different products Oracle supports has created a bit of a maze of how to get connected to the technology group best capable of answering a particular question, or dealing with an issue. For example, what starts as a "My application isn't available" issue might stem from access management, database, middleware technology, the application group, or because some 3rd party plugin failed causing a cascade failure. Oracle does attempt to support all of its products with alacrity, but it helps a lot for you as the customer, to know how it all fits together. Your perception could range from 4 to 9/10 depending on your experience level with the products.

We use a half-dozen different appliication server technologies - which one is used depends more on application compatibility than choosing one specific one-size fits all solution. These include Microsoft IIS, LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP), InfoSphere, and many smaller vendors.

One major pre-installation question that catches you unaware is the question of a "standalone" versus "single node cluster" installation style selection. Single-node clusters can be scaled up and out. Standalone installations are single-node only, and would have to be re-installed to enable clustering. This is an old throwback to the original licensing model, and tends to be a source of odd frustration of you choose the wrong one inadvertently. Most of the modern upgrade releases are now out-of-place upgrades (meaning they install to new installation filesystem bases, and not overlaying an existing install). This change was designed to maximize uptime, but does mean you'll need the extra storage available to have the side-by-side software reside during the upgrade process.

This depends on whether we have experience configuring the new application being hosted, or not. WebLogic by itself, is simply an application hosting architecture. But most applicaiton deployments are not as simple as visiting an online store and clicking an Install button. WebLogic is not what I would recommend for quickly standing up a proof-of-concept beta application. But when architecting a solution for hundreds, thousands or millions of users, it's perfectly suited.

For our installations, we've recovered our initial procurement costs within the first five years of operation, simply by re-using existing excess capacity to host additional applications. Once configured for production load, there is very minimal day-to-day administration required, and integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager monitoring allows full transparency to all processes and targets within the WebLogic technology stack.

As an application platform, you will need to carefully forecast your overall user and process load, and service-level agreements (SLA) in order to purchase an appropriate CPU count licensing, and host licensing for clustering, if needed. If your growth and capacity requirements aren't easily determined, you may want to consider Oracle's hosted Cloud options which have more of a capacity on-demand pricing model (especially the Public Cloud version.)

As mentioned, we purchase based upon application-focus, and not for custom development. As a result, choice of application hosting technology is driven according to compatibility and certification, rather than technical featuresets.

Cloning and replication of WebLogic instances isn't exactly a rote science. Because the stacks become secured against the hosting environments, encapsulating and re-cconfiguring a working installation into a new set of hosts (with differing names and IP addresses) involves several procedures to re-secure, re-encrypt and reinstate the software to hardware trust certificates. While this process is relatively encapsulated for WebLogic in eBusiness Suite, sometimes it's faster to simply re-install WebLogic on the new hosts, than attempting to re-configure from a backup from a different host set. This is differentiated from the process of scale-up or scaled-down of a cluster, which is a well-defined process by comparison (and automated as an Oracle Enterprise Manager provisioning process.) Once deployed, most change management involves the deployment of application services between instances, and not replication of the WebLogic environment itself.

I work with Telcos, one of the cell phone providers in South Africa, and they use it for their billing infrastructure. 

The applications running on the WebLogic suite are for billing and customer CRM, which goes out to the call centers and the dealers. We maintain the environment.

The feature that I have found to be the most valuable is the ease of deployment. 

In the beginning, you do tend to struggle a bit, but once it's deployed, then everything falls into place and maintaining it is quite simple.

It is difficult to say which features can be improved at the moment, as we are not working with the most current version and I am not aware of the features offered in the new version. 

Once we catch up and move on to version 12C, we need to see what can be migrated to the cloud. 

It might not be suitable to migrate the systems to the cloud, or maybe only portions of it. For example, it makes sense for our web services to go on the cloud, but not the actual application, the CRM system.

If we are considering the version that we are currently working with, then I would say that it's all fairly straightforward when it comes to using it. However, there are some small things, such as being able to restart clusters, where you can choose to restart each server one by one instead of all at the same time.  

The ripple start is what we refer to as shutting down and restarting one server at a time in a cluster. In other words, when you kick off a ripple start, and it would go through, it will shut down the one instance, and start it up, then it would move to the next one. It wouldn't shut them all down, and I wouldn't have to manually, stop one, start it up, wait for it to come up and then move down to the next one. This solution would benefit from the inclusion of a ripple start function for clusters.

Also, the cloud integration, which I've heard is very strong with Oracle, it's the shift and lift methodology. 

IBM WebSphere used to do things like that, where you could do a ripple start as opposed to shutting everything down and it would manage each one individually. That would be useful. if it's a live environment we have to ripple start. That's the big one, otherwise, we are pretty happy with everything.

The debugging function is nice on the Weblogic, but one thing WebSphere has, is, that you can apply the debugging permanently, or just until the server is restarted. 

That might also be a feature that would be nice on WebLogic, but not critical because we turned it off afterward.

This solution is very stable.

The only time it's not stable is when the code has a memory leak, or it's heap dumping or the garbage collection isn't fine-tuned. That is not the environment, it's the code. The environment itself is extremely stable.

We have to get caught up as the version we are using is out of support. 

The buzzword right now is cloud, and at some point, we have to see what we can take to the cloud and what we cannot. There are plans to move in that direction.

It is scalable. We have added extra servers and extra instances when it's been required. 

We don't run on VMs, we run on IBM LPARS. We don't run VMs where you can have them firing up, on-demand, but it is scalable for our purposes.

Officially it's not supported, but we do get support when it's required. For example,  approximately six months ago there was that day-zero vulnerability bug that had to be patched. 

The patch that we applied on WebLogic actually broke some environments.

We logged tickets and worked with Oracle and they were able to support us, isolate the issue, and give us new fixes. 

The support was very good and worked very well.

From this experience, I would rate the technical support quite highly. They were able to pinpoint the issue quite rapidly and assist us with a new patch. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Previously, we used the IBM product called WebSphere.

WebSphere and WebLogic are both very similar. They have the same purpose, the same end. I liked the way WebLogic is compartmentalized in the server where you can go and find the configurations, and see it on a file. It's fairly file-based, the data source is everything. 

WebSphere wasn't stored quite that way, so you couldn't work as nicely outside the system. 

There might have been a few other tweaks that WebSphere had which Oracle doesn't. But on the whole, I would say Oracle is far better, it more superior to the IBM product.

The initial setup is complex. We did a migration from WebSphere to WebLogic.

The reason it's complex is it was already running, but it was a very different animal than WebSphere. There were code changes required, which fell to the developers on the development side. On the operational side, things like fine-tuning little things like the data sources work a bit differently, but once you figure one out, then the rest all falls into place.

At the moment the deployment model we use is on-premises, and nothing has been migrated to the cloud. It's a project for the future.

The deployment was approximately just over one year to get it migrated fully to where we were stable enough to turn off the WebSphere.

It was a little bit better than I had expected it to be. We all felt it would be an eighteen-month to a two-year project, and it did come in a little bit less than that. But of course, the business expects it in three to six months. We did try but realized that it was not going to happen unless everything just magically works the first time.

I'm on the operations side, I'm not on the development side. We look after the infrastructure and the upgrading.

The developers are a large team. On the operations team, we have approximately ten people. One person can do a feature release, which is what we call a deployment, in an evening. This is done three times a week.

We do deployments roughly once a week, three times a month. 

We have our own in-house developed deployment manager, which we call the Deployamater, and they set up all the deployments. The manager fetches the EARs, JARs, pages, and JSP files, then it deploys them. 

We don't use the automated deploying via Oracle. We manage it like that, but we do it in an offline environment. 

We duplicate our environments and we go to our offline environment, deploy there, test it first, and then switch the traffic to the new environment that it's being deployed to.

I am a subcontractor to Vodacom, and the company I work for is a vendor, and they are an approved vendor with Oracle.

It is difficult to offer advice because every scenario is different, but I would suggest that you use the available expertise. There is a lot of expertise, don't try to do it all alone.

I wouldn't go back to WebSphere and for me, I would say it is the market leader.

I would recommend this solution and I would rate this product a ten out of ten.

The most valuable features are that it's easily deployable and easily scalable. It'll shrink and can grow as much as you want. Those are the benefits, but when compared to other products, such open-source Tomcat, we've considered moving from WebLogic to Tomcat because WebLogic is very expensive.

It's scalable for the company and easily deployable. The GUI and integration with SSO is more beneficial than other available options.

It's definitely a complex solution. It throws at least a million lines of errors just for one password. You can get a small issue that could potentially generate about a thousand of lines with warnings, and those warnings might mean nothing. It will just pop up warnings, so you'd have alerts for nothing. It's not that easy from the admin perspective if you're not really familiar with what you're getting into. It's not 100% GUI, so that you need to know lots and lots of configuration files.

We've had no issues with deployment. In fact, it deploys very easily.

WebLogic is not a light product. Java uses the whole memory of the server so it's a memory hog.

We've had no issues with scaling it for our needs.

The initial setup was easy and pretty straightforward.

We did the implementation ourselves with our in-house team.

It's quite expensive.

If it were like Tomcat, configuring .xml files would take care of some things, but there's not a particular main .xml file available with WebLogic. In fact, there are so many important .xml files that are needed for WebLogic.

It's highly expensive and there are other much, much better products out for the cost of peanuts.

It's a very scalable, extensible, middleware component. It's especially useful for big data applications if you're using APIs or have geo-spatial data or complex data sets.

It's also a very affordable and efficient.

I would like to see Oracle offer the WebLogic Suite in other areas, like SaaS or PaaS. From what I've seen at Oracle World, they're already moving in that direction, so it gives you a broader portfolio or different ways to leverage their technology.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

It's very stable. It can handle a lot of database storage and repositories. It's really the backbone of a lot of our systems that we use for our federal customers. It's very smooth and not buggy, and now that more people are learning how to troubleshoot and work with the product, it's becoming exponentially easier to find quality to support it during the WebLogic application process.

Obviously, it works best with Exadata servers, so that's what it really helped us with. We were running WebLogic on servers that weren't optimized for that software. I think we may have had it on IBM Blade and the servers we were using weren't necessarily optimized for the WebLogic tool. Once we kicked in the Exadata server, it increased the time to process.

The level of technical support is very good. The SMEs that are coming to help us have been excellent. It's very easy to get a hold of them and we talk weekly with our account reps to make sure things are going well. They are very approachable and always easy to get hold of, as well as being very knowledgeable.

We just like Oracle products.

I usually use the single model or the clustering model of the solution. We deploy the dual application, ADF application, and BPM application, and there is a different scenario for each of them even though they all use WebLogic services. Each use case is somewhat different. It is our customers that use WebLogic. I deal with mid-size companies and also enterprise size companies. We are resellers and I'm the technical manager. 

WebLogic has a very robust server so the product is robust. If there are issues it's usually because there's been a misconfiguration or maybe the application deployed under the WebLogic server has errors. Another positive is that you don't need to go editing external files - the console and the enterprise management tools that Oracle provide for monitoring are really easy to work. The parameters and everything can be found on the console.

Another point is that it has a different way for configuring and working with the application server. You have the EM, the console, and the WLST which you can use the scripting for. You can even extract the WebLogic server from another dual application which can be used in a programming application so you have a console over their application service.

One other feature that is useful is that you can extract WebLogic from different scenarios and from different environments. Because it's based on Java you can run with WebLogic on a PC which has Windows on a server which has AIX or Linux or any other environments. It can handle all of the environments. There are so many good things about this application, I could go on for an hour. 

I think the only area where Weblogic could be improved would be if they were to develop a solution for smaller applications. WebLogic is really a solution for enterprise companies, meaning that it requires a lot of RAM. Sometimes you're working on a smaller application but WebLogic still needs a huge amount of RAM for it to work. Jboss or Apache, on the other hand, would start with the minimum amount of RAM, for example, 300 megabytes and with WebLogic, you need 3GB or 4GB. Because it's very heavy, the extraction time is longer compared to other solutions. Jboss would start in seven seconds, whereas WebLogic would start in 40 or 50 seconds. If there was a light version of WebLogic that would be useful. 

I would also like to be able to turn off features. For example, if I don't want to use the GMS, I can't turn it off. 

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

This is a very stable solution.

The product has great scalability. It can handle many concurrent users because of its coherent architecture.

We don't need any support for this solution but many of our customers get the Patch Updates from the Oracle website. 

I think Oracle WebLogic and IBM Websphere are the best application servers that anybody can use for the Java application. I haven't worked with Websphere but from what I've read it's good, although it's only relevant for enterprise applications. Oracle WebLogic can be used for both enterprise and standard applications, and also in the development environment.If you're looking at midsize applications, then there are other competitors as well, whether from Oracle, Jboss, Tomcats, all of them. For enterprise applications, I think WebLogic and WebSphere are the two main players in the market. 

The initial setup of WebLogic is very easy. You only need about 10 minutes to start the application. Compared to other Oracle products, it's very straightforward and easy to configure. 

I'm not involved in licensing. I know that Oracle has a site called shop.oracle and you can check it there. There is a support team and online sales team that could help with that. 

If you take the time to go through the documentation of this product and its features you'll become familiar with the enterprise standards. It's a good path to becoming familiar with enterprise architecture. Even from an academic perspective, learning and using this application server can be a good start to understanding what can be achieved with an enterprise application server. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

The stability of it is probably the most valuable feature for us. We were initially using Oracle Application Server, but found that Oracle advanced quite a lot with WebLogic in terms of stability. We noticed a huge difference and, in comparison, Application Server was really quite flaky.

We've found it to be the most reliable and stable platform for building our Java applications.

What I didn't like about it initially was the fact that WebLogic was a purchase from BEA. It wasn't Oracle's product initially, and I found whenever they initially released the product, it was quite buggy. Hence, we didn't move away from Oracle Application Server immediately. Now in the latter versions they seem to have eliminated all the bugs, but I think if Oracle does take over software or middleware from other companies before releasing their own version of it, I think they should be testing it a little bit more to eliminate any bugs before it goes in the market.

Also, our WebLogic and Oracle Linux are bound together, that's what we were looking for as our High Availability solution. Getting Oracle Linux highly available was difficult, and getting WebLogic highly available was difficult, too. But then trying to put the two products together as well was even more complicated.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

Again, it's very stable, and we've been pleased with it in comparison to Application Server.

It's scaled sufficiently for our needs.

We found Oracle technical support to be very, very difficult to deal with. To eventually get to the right engineer, you have to go through numerous escalations. I think the escalation process probably needs to be revisited by them to provide a better experience for paying customers.

For us, going to WebLogic was the support. Oracle Application Server was out of support, so we went to WebLogic and now we have support on our projects that we're rolling out for many years to come.

The actual WebLogic we're running runs on Oracle Linux, and when we put that on, we found the documentation to get the High Availability running quite complicated as well. Also I would say when Oracle releases these new versions of their products, you find that the support you get isn't probably what it should be. It takes a long while for support to ramp up and to get the knowledge of the new products, so I think a good thing would be for these products to come out unreleased to businesses. Then the support people should be brought right up to speed and be ready for any questions because by the time you get to an engineer who maybe knows the product or knows the situation you're in, it takes an awful lot of escalation time.

For installing or looking at the database, I would say look at the components that you need within the database. What we generally find is that most of the features that we want, or most of the features that are available in Enterprise Edition, we actually wouldn't use. So take time and you might actually see them only by using Standard Edition.

We primarily use the solution for the UI (user interface), as a middleware product that communicates between different servers including application servers and databases.

I think the way the managed servers and the load balancing as well as the threading have been distributed is very good.

The transaction handling of WebLogic and the way it is designed is excellent.

Customization is a bit of an issue for us. 

Support could be better. The expertise when we have some Oracle WebLogic issues and challenges is not there. The issues are not being addressed in time. This really needs to be improved going forward.

I've been using the solution for five years.

We've been using the solution for five years and haven't had any issues with stability so far. There haven't been bugs or glitches. We haven't had crashes.

The solution is scalable. This shouldn't be a problem for organizations that need to expand.

We have about 200 people using the product currently. Mostly they are developers and testing teams.

We've contacted technical support in the past. They've been okay, but they could be better. Sometimes it takes a while to get answers and some individuals don't have a clear knowledge base. I'd rate it seven out of ten in terms of satisfaction levels.

We haven't used a different solution. However, we have a vendor who has created a product which is based on the WebLogic.

The initial setup was not handled by myself. We have a separate team that handles the actual installation of WebLogic. However, I didn't see challenges in the implementation and the team didn't raise any issues that I know of.

I don't remember the exact version number of the solution we are using, but it's around version 12.

I'd suggest other companies shop around. There are other competitors. The cost and the actual purpose of the application should be considered before choosing any solution. 

However, we can recommend this solution considering the stability and scalability that we have seen over the last five years.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.