First step in creating the SOA Weblogic domain is to select "Oracle SOA Suite" product. The dilemma that I face is whether to select "Oracle SOA Suite" or " Oracle BPM Suite for developers".
Oracle documentation says about developers suite that it do not create an Managed Servers instead it creates only a single Administration Server. As a general practice, Managed servers are created in production and in case of development, single admin server is used for deployment.
Below are few advantages of having managed server over non-managed server.
- It is independant server which will keep on working even if the admin server fails.
- Production environments that require increased application performance, throughput, or availability should configure two or more of Managed Servers as a cluster.
- Multiple managed servers means multiple JVMs which inturn needs more memory.
- Having multiple managed servers will create an additional task to start that server after admin server is started. If the SOA server is a part of admin server then just start of server will also start SOA server i.e. it will start port 8001 and 7001 both.
In short, there is no significant difference in developer mode and non-developer mode. So it is your decision to go with managed server mode or with developer mode. My suggestion would be
- For 32 bit machine which will have RAM restriction of 2^32 Bytes i.e. 4 GB, you should go for developer mode.
- Now days most of the machines are 64 bit and will support 2^64 Byes i.e. more than 18 quintillion, you should go for managed server mode.
Let me know if there are any points i have not considered. Comments appriciated.
