WebLogic Whole-Server Migration on EC2 Cloud?

WebLogic whole-server migration is a compelling solution for the availability of servers and pinned resources such as JMS  on those servers. It simply moves the IP address to the new candidate machine before starting the managed server there. From the perspective of the managed server there is no change at all, since even the IP address is the same. The crucial point however is the availability of floating IP addresses that can be automatically reassigned by the wlsifconfig.sh script.

On EC2 there are only two IP addresses per instance, a public and a private one. You cannot get additional IP addresses, so whole-server migration isn’t of much use.

In fact, you could get an elastic IP address, which is a reassignable, static IP address assigned to an EC instance. Still an elastic IP is not useful for server-migration because assignment of the address requires the EC2 command-line and cannot be done directly from the cluster script using ifconfig.

This text is a digest of my upcoming book about cloud computing with Oracle.