Opalis 6.3 Operator Console Installation Made Easy!

For anyone that has had the pleasure (and heartache!) of installing Opalis 6.3 from scratch, then you will know it is a long and arduous process that involves first installing the Opalis 6.2 Management Server, Database, importing the Licence, installing the Operator Console, upgrading to Opalis 6.2 SP1 and then upgrading to Opalis 6.3

The hard part was when you wanted to install the Opalis Operator Console and this involved the following:

• download a number of pre-requisite Java and JBoss installers (approx 200MB worth of them!)
• copy these files to a directory on the C:\ drive
• ensuring that you had set the 'Path' Environment variable set to %JAVA_HOME%\bin
• run the java executables from a command line
• open powershell and run the Opalis console operator installer script (installopconsole.ps1)
• starting JBoss by running 'run.bat-b 0.0.0.0 from the <JBOSS>\bin folder

If all of these steps were followed exactly to the letter, then the Powershell script would run through a number of installation steps, prompting for user intervention to eventually finish the installation of the Operator Console!!

See below link for a more detailed step by step installation:

http://systemcenterblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/installing-opalis-part-i-opalis-622.html

Once this was completed, you then needed to updgrade Opalis 6.2 to Opalis 6.2.2 SP1

http://systemcenterblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/installing-opalis-part-2-upgrading-to.html

Finally, you then needed to copy an MSI file containing the Opalis 6.3 binaries to the install location and run an upgrade patch to complete the Opalis 6.3 upgrade.

http://systemcenterblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/installing-opalis-part-3-upgrading-to.html

Talk about going around the block for an installation!!!

In fairness, we really enjoyed doing this installation as it brought back memories of long winded legacy application installations from a few years back and lets you really get into the nuts and bolts of the Opalis install structure.

So, how is that 'Made Easy' (see blog post title above!) you might ask?

Well, I came across an entry last night on the System Center Technet site from Adam Hall - Snr Technical Product Manager for Opalis - about a new 3rd party tool that pretty much automates all of the hard part of the installation of the Operator Console that I have outlined in my steps above.

The product is from a company called 'Kelverion' and I downloaded it last night and ran it against a new test VM with no previous Opalis installation to see how it compared to our first attempt at Opalis 6.3 installation (which took us nearly 2 hours by the time we figured out all the steps and read the documentation last month!).

The results are amazing and I managed to get the whole Opalis 6.3 installation including the Operator Console installed in just under 30 minutes! The reason it is so quick is that Kelverion's Configuration Utility for OpConsole is nearly 200MB in size and contains all of the Pre-Requisite software such as Java and JBoss inside the MSI file. It runs through a nice handy wizard prompting you for all of the required information including creating and naming the new directories to place and run the Pre-Requisite software from. The best thing about this is that it is free too!

You can read more about this utility here:

http://www.kelverion.com/news/2011/1/26/kelverion-configuration-utility-for-opconsole-released.html

You need to register for your free download from here (you will get an email within a minute with the download link):

http://www.kelverion.com/utility-for-opconsole-download/

You can view a really quick 5 minute video of the utility in action here:

http://www.kelverion.com/utility-for-opconsole-demo

I most definitely recommend that you use this utility for any future Opalis Operator Console installations that you are deploying -although the orginal long way is worth doing for the fun at least once!.