We have installed various versions of Oracle BRM on multiple platforms countless times. The installation process is mostly free of pain now, still it is a time consuming task. Imagine you have to replicate it across a dozen development, test and integration instances and eventually into production. Suddenly managing configuration files and port numbers manually becomes a mission impossible.

For development and training purpose, the answer is simple, it's VM. Virtualization is a technology spear-headed by VMWare, it is now also adopted by Oracle. A VMWare Oracle BRM image is a virtual machine running CentOS, containing a Oracle database and a functioning BRM environment. Just drop it into a VMWare player and voilà, you are set.

The BRM image on Oracle VM follows the same principle, but it is a little more cumbersome to use. Oracle VM Server installs itself on a physical server, thus if you want it to be portable, be prepare to have a i7 Quadcore laptop. We start with a template let's say OEL5 and 11g database, install the out-of-the-box BRM once, then save and reuse the template. Nowadays we can produce VMWare or Oracle VM BRM images on any supported configuration.

Okay what about deploying BRM into production environments with various configuration? To do that we'll introduce a Release Management concept built specifically for this purpose. Please stay tune.