Prerequisites and deploying an agent

Today, both agents are made available through a bash shell installer (.bsx) file. This means you need a bash shell environment that has been certified by Oracle. Presently, this means running a Red Hat or Oracle Linux platform (Microsoft are increasingly incorporating support for Linux within Windows, but it has a way to go before this is production fit and certified by Oracle).

If you are not running one of these environments natively, then the easiest solution is to exploit a virtualization technology. Oracle offers several, in our case VirtualBox is the best answer. Oracle even provides a number of prebuilt VirtualBox environments that can be downloaded so we do not have to create a new operating system environment from scratch.

This approach is not the most ideal when it comes to production readiness, where you may wish to consider a Linux instance on native hardware or via a large-scale virtualization platform such as Oracle virtual machine, or Red...