In an Oracle SOA Suite 11.1.1.2 environment we had a composite which has a Active mode, but status remained down. Trying to redeploy or undeploy with Enterprise Manager the composite resulted in timeouts, the error message was:

Unable to retrieve composite details.
Error retrieving Composite CompositeName (1.0) details from soa-infra runtime. This could happen due to the errors in soa-infra initialization. Please view the log files for details.

Creating a simple ANT script resulted in a timeout as well:

   <target name="undeployProject">
		<echo>Undeploying ${project} for environment ${omgeving}</echo>
		<ant antfile="${oracle.home}/bin/ant-sca-deploy.xml" inheritall="true" target="undeploy">
			<property name="serverURL"      value="${serverURL}"/>
			<property name="user"           value="${user}"/>
			<property name="password"       value="${password}"/>
			<property name="compositeName"  value="${project}"/>
			<property name="revision"       value="1.0"/>
			<property name="partition"      value="default"/>
			<property name="failOnError"    value="true"/>
		</ant>
	</target>

As did the simplest ANT command result in a timeout:
ant -f ant-sca-deploy.xml undeploy -DserverURL=http://localhost:8001 -DcompositeName=myComposite

Meanwhile the soa_server1 managed server seemed to have generated stuck threads which probably where generated by either the Ant and/or EM deployment tasks. So we decided to restart the MS.

Restarting the soa_server1 managed server did not help either in the 1st attempt, the same composite still remained unavailable. Then the soa_server1 was stopped again, but this time the Tmp and Cache folders where deleted under the \domain\servers\soa_server1\ folder. After startup the composite became up again. More interesting the new update was also active.

Conclusion (for know):
So it seems like the Ant and/or EM task succesfully deployed the update to the MDS but somewhere between the Weblogic soa_server1 Managed Server and MDS the communication failed. Clearing up the cache and/or tmp folder seemed to do the trick.

References:

• Biemond – Deploy Soa Suite 11g composite applications with Ant scripts
• Oracle – Deploying SCA composites