WebLogic Suite Reviews

WebLogic Suite is a solution that I use myself and I also provide services to my customers.

In my company, it is a standalone instance that is not connected to a cluster.

This solution hosts our Oracle Business Intelligence application, OBIEE, and other Oracle applications.

The most valuable feature is that it provides one place where you can control all of the services. You can switch on and off individual services, which comes in very handy.

The restart capability needs to be improved because it takes us 15 minutes to restart any application.

This is a heavy application, like everything that comes from Oracle.

Debugging with this solution is tough and a bit complex.

The interface is not very user-friendly.

I have been using WebLogic Suite for between two and three years.

We have close to 500 users.

We have been in contact with Oracle support, although not for this solution.

In general, Oracle support is good.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

We only had to deploy this solution once. Since that time, we have switched it off and on every two or three months for maintenance.

We manage one of the instances ourselves, and the other one is outsourced to a third-party in the US.

Oracle is costly compared to the other solutions that we have. It is double the price of a similar solution that we use from Microsoft.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The most valuable feature of WebLogic for me is that we can host all our web apps on it, HFM mainly.

It's been great overall. We get to host all of our HFM web apps on there, all the business users can log on, and it runs seamlessly. It suits our business needs pretty well.

When you run the WebLogic admin console, it takes a few minutes to come up. Having the admin console come up a little quicker would be an improvement.

It's definitely stable. We have weekly reboots, and it seems to come up after the weekly reboot. We have no problems with stability.

It is scaled to our needs and there have been no issues. We just run a fresh install and the WebLogic sites come right up.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward. Basically, it’s a couple check boxes, a few nexts and then a couple configuration items and connection strings. An amateur computer user could go through it and use it straight away.

Before you configure anything for Oracle, make sure you start the WebLogic admin console on the primary web servers.

I like that fact that it is the most scalable and the best-of-breed application server for hosting any kind of an application. One of the best things about WebLogic Suite is that the enterprise customers we work with have a broad spectrum of Oracle products that they use, from BPM to E-Business Suite to whatever. One thing common to all of these solutions is the fact that they're all on WebLogic server.

It's multi-tenant, is highly available, and I believe it's the best-in-class application server for Java. Most of Oracle's products are in Java, so they are all supported on WebLogic Server. That is one of the biggest aspects. It's very reliable, it's enterprise-grade, so we get great support from Oracle as well.

Technically, there's absolutely nothing that you cannot get from a WebLogic Server in terms of availability and scalability. It is very easy to maintain, and if you look at other JMX process based servers, they don't give you a great console. But WebLogic Server gives you a console for administration, creating resources, managing those resources, troubleshooting, diagnostics, and everything else all in one place.

In an enterprise, a solution is not delivered by a single system but a lot of them. You would often find that to achieve a particular business function, you're using ABS, you're using Server Suite, you're likely using several other solutions. So WebLogic Server provides one common platform for deploying all of these applications, and you don't have to invest in five different application servers for five different applications that you're using. It helps consolidate your systems, especially your middleware servers.

Multi-tenancy is needed. It is starting to come in the latest releases, but it is a very basic multi-tenant feature at the moment. I would like a more enterprise-grade multi-tenancy feature coming into WebLogic. Many organizations use WebLogic for all of their applications, but what we also have to think about is that each application wants to share the platform, and they want some sort of isolation from other tenants or other business units in an organization. How WebLogic addresses that challenge is by having multiple tenants that share the same infrastructure without disturbing each other.

I've been using WebLogic since v5.0 to v12.2, where it is right now.

We've had no issues with deployment.

Stability is not necessarily dependent upon WebLogic, but it depends upon the type of application that you deploy. It's a common platform where you can put pretty much everything. Most often than not, what we see is a combination of WebLogic and the application that you deploy on top of it which causes stability issues, not just in isolation.

For example, you know that you have Java and that Java has memory leaks. But it's not just Java that's causing memory leaks, it's the application and Java in combination that can cause this problem. The same thing with WebLogic, so it's not just WebLogic alone. It is almost always your application as well as WebLogic Server together that causes a problem. But as a platform, it is very stable.

We can scale it to thousands of users without a problem. We've had no issues at all with scalability.

The initial setup is very easy and very straightforward.

• The managed server and deployment architecture.
• Being able to isolate or combine applications at various levels whilst taking advantage of load balancing and clusters.
• The web interface is fairly easy to use, but for those who want it, the majority of commands can be executed via scripts WLST.
• Being able to create deployment templates for use on other hosts.

It's allowed us to contain and administer the WebLogic environment as a managed service. We support and manage our customer environments onsite and remotely by using the web GUI.

There is little to improve, but I would say the deployment process could be more user-friendly. Using staging to secure your deployment environment does bring its problems. They are easy to solve but require access to the drive space.

I've been using it since 2009.

We have come across some issues with clustering, but it was the third-party application that needed the change and not WebLogic.

We have found that on the odd occasion of a host shutdown, the services and Node Manager wouldn’t start the deployments as specified. Manual intervention was required.

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

It's very good as Oracle support has always been useful. It's a bit painful to fill out all the details and provide all the logs, but it works so I’ll keep using it. The people on the other end are usually very experienced and resolve the issues relatively quickly.

It's straightforward and easy to install and set up. There is plenty of documentation and online experience to follow and learn from.

We are the vendor and implement the solution for our customers. My advice would be to get yourself on one of the administration workshops that Oracle provides or self-teach on YouTube. Talk to a partner in your area as they can provide you with workshops and training.

Oracles prices/licenses are painful to deal with. Understand the architecture and application requirements up front, i.e. number of users or hardware available.

WebLogic has been first choice for us numerous times.

If you are unsure about your decision, run a POC with authorization from Oracle through a partner like NEC. Trial and test it for 30 days and see if it meets your requirements. Ensure you have a WebLogic administrator to help guide you through it.

Understand the recommended requirements for the apps and assign the correct memory. This will allow you to achieve a good user experience. The High Availability and high performance provide a solid foundation for application hosting. The apps teams see the benefit and stability when they start using it.

The cluster configuration and cluster performance are the most valuable features for us. In fact, they're better in this most recent version than in previous ones, making it a better solution overall.

Transactions monitoring graphics need to be improved. When I need to monitor sample transaction response times or something similar, I need to use third-party tools. I assume that it is possible to see transaction performances on the WebLogic console with some graphics, so I'd like to have that feature.

I have been using WebLogic for 10 years, and v12.1.3 for the last year.

If the packet is bigger than 800MB, then the deployment is very, very difficult with the Weblogic admin console. To make this work, we have to use wlst.sh scripts to deploy.

We have had no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

Oracle Support is perfect for their Database, but for WebLogic/CC&B it is not so good, and for that I give it a 6/10.

I have used many application servers, and this is the best for performance and for a user-friendly management console.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I have implemented it both through a vendor team and through our in-house team.

Due to the exchange rate, it is expensive for Turkish companies.

It gives good performance, but we still have to use third-party tools for monitoring. You should take that into consideration when deciding whether to purchase it.

The most valuable feature to us is its user friendliness as well as its admin features, which are much better then the previous versions of Oracle.

First of all, what we do is, we have some products which run on WebLogic. They're really great, in the sense that we have never found a bug or the like. It's just very easy to implement. It's been going great. There are really no issues at all.

I am not a very techy guy, though I know how to use the product. Areas for improvement should come from my developer.

It's pretty stable.

It has scaled well to our needs over time.

When you open a ticket it is resolved in a timely fashion, absolutely. Obviously Oracle has a an advanced process with these things, like the priority of the service request. Based on that it is resolved. We're happy with how it gets prioritized and the service we're getting.

The previous version was called Oracle Application Server. That was the one we used. That used to have a lot of issues. 

After Oracle started pitching on WebLogic, things were really great. 

We didn't consider any other vendors along the way. We are Oracle partners and we are very happy with this. We will continue with them.

I would say out of the servers that we have used - one is an Apache Tomcat which is Open Source, which we typically use for demos and other things; and then the WebLogic, and then the Oracle Application Server. These are the three things we have used. I rate WebLogic at least a nine out of 10.

I would say I'm very happy with it and I would recommend using this product. However, if you want to use Oracle Apache Tomcat, that is also something which works great. The only thing with Open Source is, as long as long as it's working great, it's great. But, there is a possibility that if something goes wrong you will need support. The support will cost as much as buying WebLogic.

It's always better to go with Oracle, where you know what you are getting and you will get good support. That way, I would recommend WebLogic.

I think that the best feature of WebLogic, as far as middleware goes, is that it's very license-friendly. It's a part of the suite of products that our DBA has included, and I trust that because it means the DBA really wanted it. There are multiple products that compete with WebLogic, but it's completely Oracle, which means that the licensing with other Oracle products is great.

Because it's in the middleware layer, I would like to see better scalability for scaling up. Also, they should provide sizing guidelines so that customers can take it and deploy it.

WebLogic has been there for a while. I've had my hands on it since it Oracle acquired the company in 2008.

We've had no issues deploying it.

It's a no-brainer that it’s stable. The only thing you should pay attention to is how scalable it is.

You should run your workload on WebLogic then see if it scales well. Then based on that, you keep on adding the WebLogic server to scale more.

I think technical support is knowledgeable, but in some instances I've seen they are completely focused on one single product, not seeing the whole end-to-end solution of the customer. That's where they get lost.

We have JBoss, too, and it's far better than JBoss. It’s more powerful, in terms of the number of sessions you can run on WebLogic, compared to the other product.

Our transactions, our business runs smoother. It provides greater efficiency and performance.

The patching is painful; if they wouldn’t release as frequently. Every time you have a patch, you have to upgrade. I’d like to see them improve the release of the patches; instead of monthly, maybe every three months; or specify which patches are critical, which everyone should have, and which ones are optional, like how the OS patches are.

We haven’t had any stability issues; it's pretty stable.

We haven't had any scalability issues.

We have seen good ROI on Oracle compared to JBoss.

We looked at JBoss. We decided to use the Oracle product because our Oracle stack is pretty stable. We have SPARC and we have Oracle databases. It makes sense in terms of getting better ROI.

If you don’t want any outages, you want peace of mind, and your application running smoothly, I would say go for WebLogic. Why would you want a painful experience? It's smooth.