WebLogic Suite Reviews

I like that it's industry tested and available on various platforms. I'm not sure we use any specific features of it, other than it’s a robust web server; the services, the database pools, good integration with Oracle database 12c, which is another product that we have.

Having the Oracle support has improved how my organization functions. We have a support contract for it 24/7. That's a huge thing, having the support.

Being able to stay on top of the release cycle and having reps that can keep us in the loop has been a major benefit.

I would like to see better integration with some of the cloud stuff that Oracle provides. We just went to an Oracle hackathon; a couple of us, a couple of weeks ago. It's a little confusing how the WebLogic Server, the cloud services and some other services interact; we were just trying to see how that works. What's the vision Oracle has bringing those two worlds together? That's what I'd like to see.

I’ve found it very stable. We haven't really had any issues that are related to the product at all.

We have scaled it. We've had this product several years and kept upgrading it, of course. We started out with, maybe, one server instance, and then two, and now we're up to four. We haven't really had any major issues, as long as you follow the standards. It's been great.

We had some Oracle people that we worked with that came in house. We were doing a major upgrade. People came and helped us day-to-day for a number of weeks. It's been great. As I’ve mentioned, having the 24/7 support, especially from our DBAs’ perspective, has been a real plus.

Back in the day, probably 15 years ago, there were very few application servers. WebLogic was, at the time, the best. Of course, it changed hands a few times. Oracle finally bought it. We were an Oracle shop. We had a database. There just wasn't really any other solution, in terms of having the quality and support that we enjoy. I think that's important.

When you're running a business and you have customers around the country depending on you to get the business done, having the up time, having the server stable, and having that support behind us is the most important thing.

When I’m looking at a vendor, it's important that they follow industry standards, and have very strong support. I keep coming back to the 24/7 support. That's been invaluable for us; to be able to pick up the phone, or have somebody get on site with us because it's a mission-critical type of business we're in. That's the most important; having the Oracle name and standard, following that.

At that time, there were only a few options. At a previous company, we even made sort of a homegrown, homespun version, aspiring to get to WebLogic someday, when we had enough money. This was a start-up.

When I joined the company I'm with now, they had just become an Oracle shop and started with this product. I think we evaluated JBoss at the time. Every couple of years, we evaluate and see what's out there.

WebLogic's still the strongest, with all the suite of products that they provide.

If you are serious about it and you have the money to spend, then spend it on a winner. There's all kinds of open source stuff out there. Stuff is changing constantly. If you're trying to run an enterprise business, it's sounds great, it's great for proof of concept. But, when it comes down to it, you don't want to build your own car. You want to buy something that's got some standards, has a big name behind it. That's what I suggest.

I don't give anything a perfect rating. This is software. It's constantly changing. Again, the breadth of services that are provided, and the support, again, is key to us.

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.

One of the most valuable features of WebLogic is that deployment is an easy process. The code can be deployed on multiple instances without rework.

With a huge number of servers for our application, manual deployment would be an extremely tedious, error prone and time- (hence money-) consuming process. WebLogic has assisted us in this aspect.

The initial setup and administration does require expertise. While bigger organizations can afford to have dedicated horizontal teams, I assume smaller organizations may not be able to afford this. The default setup should include more features such as more scripts and more users with different privileges, which could resolve this issue.

I have used this solution for over four and a half years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability either.

WebLogic was our first choice.

We did not require vendor support. Setup was done by my team and me.

Licensing is expensive but it is worth the cost. If you are going to utilize all its features, then you should go for it. If you do not have enough budget, you could choose for other freeware options and use automation and orchestration tools instead. This will surely have an impact on stability in the initial phases of implementation.

Although, I was not working while choosing it, WebLogic has been the first choice for organization. However, now after many years we are evaluating to look for other freeware options.

You need to consider the licensing and upgrade costs. In addition, it will help to have a dedicated administration team.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.