WebLogic 12.1.2 Installation in VirtualBox with 0 MHz

The Situation

 I just looked at a problem at a customer site installing WebLogic 12.1.2 in a VirtualBox environment. WebLogic 12.1.2 uses – unlike all previous versions of WebLogic – the Oracle Unified Installer (OUI) which first of all seemed to be the problem.

The Problem

Here is what happened in detail:

– The installation failed because the OUI installer is checking the prerequisites and reports all CPUs with 0 MHz. For sure, this is not good enough (even with all the clever energy saving techniques in modern CPUs)

– The key question is whether OUI is buggy or the problem is somewhere else, e.g. in the OS or virtualization layer.

Solution

$ grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo

reports indeed 0 MHz for all CPUs. So the problem is not related to OUI but a VirtualBox issue. Still a weird problem. Why would CentOS be running with 0 MHz??

– VirtualBox might report 0 MHz for your CPU in case you selected the wrong chipset for your machine (in our case the developer’s HP laptop). Note, this means that exactly the same VirtualBox image will run fine on different hardware!

To fix it, stop the running guest and change the chipset setting in VirtualBox Manager from the default PIX3 to the non-default ICH9.

– Once this is done. Restart the guest image and check again. The CPUs should be reported correctly and OUI will run successfully.

$ grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo 
cpu MHz : 2664.287
cpu MHz : 2664.287
cpu MHz : 2664.287
cpu MHz : 2664.287