The right hardware you need, to learn and play with OES 11g

I am often asked by users if their laptop xyz is good enough to learn/play with OES. On one extreme you have the bare minimum requirements and the other extreme, high end server configurations. Somewhere in the middle is Goldilocks laptop, just perfect for playing with OES.

For the last couple of years I have been using Windows 7 laptop; before that I used to exclusively rely on Linux. Overtime I have become comfortable with windows for surfing the web, writing docs and ppts. But for anything serious I have to rely on Linux. Among all options I feel that running Linux on Virtual Box is the best. For the last several months I have been running OES 11g on a Virtual Box/Linux VM and it works really well. If your laptop has sufficient disk space and memory, I would strongly recommend using a VM.

Coming back to the original question, the hardware you need depends on what you want to do. The following table gives a rough breakdown of requirements for different components. BTW, these are just seat-of-the-pants estimates:

.	Disk Space	Memory footprint
Download Package for OES Admin (including RCU, WebLogic and OES Installer)	3.13 GB	NA
Download Package for OES SM (Agent)	107 MB	NA
OES Admin (including WLS, OES Console and other tooling)	3.4 GB	1.5 GB
OES SM (Agent)	112 MB	Very small, probably 5 MB
Optional - DB	1.5 GB	0.5 GB
Optional - Virtual Machine (Virtual Box + full Linux Install)	5 GB	1 GB

Factoring in additional margins, you will need

1. For a simple OES installation (OES Admin + SM, no VM, no DB): About 4 GB free disk space and ~ 2 GB free memory for a simple OES installation (OES Admin + SM, no VM, no DB). In addition you will need ~ 3.5 GB for a one-time to download packages.
2. For an installation within VM (everything included): ~ 13.5 GB free disk space and ~ 4 GB free memory

Remember that these numbers are just for learning and playing. Hardware requirements for a production deployment will be another day’s blog post.

On a personal note I run "VM (Everything Included)" configuration on my Dell Latitude E6410 laptop:

1. CPU: Intel Dual Core i5 M520 2.4 GHz
2. Memory: 8 GB
3. Disk: 200 G