Monday 13 May 2013

11.1.2.3 – Remove EPM instance

Another new feature to hit the infrastructure side of 11.1.2.3 is the ability to remove EPM instances and the components deployed into that instance, this could be useful if you want to scale down a deployment and say consolidate components onto an existing machine or move an instance to a new machine, it could even be that you messed up and want to remove an incorrectly configured instance.
The following tasks will be performed during the instance removal for the components in this instance:

Removes the Java web applications from the cluster. If it is the last Java web application in the cluster, removes the cluster.
  • Removes the configuration for IIS web applications.
  • Removes files from EPM_ORACLE_INSTANCE
  • Removes Oracle Hyperion Shared Services Registry entries.
  • Removes Windows Start Menu entries.
  • Removes Windows Services entries.
  • Removes Windows Registry entries.
  • For Oracle Hyperion Financial Close Management, removes composites.

The following information is retained during instance removal for the components in the instance:
  • Binary files in EPM_ORACLE_HOME.
  • The contents of EPM_ORACLE_INSTANCE/diagnostics.
  • Product data.
  • Product repositories.
I know in previous versions removing Java web deployments and cleaning up the registry was certainly not fun and of course manual, though saying that this feature is currently only aimed at instance level so if you have multiple components deployed in a instance they will all be removed, hopefully in future releases this will developed to focus down to individual product component levels.

To perform a simple test of the functionality I am first going to horizontally scale out the foundation web application to a new instance.


The EPM installation was carried out on the second machine and a new EPM instance named epmscaleout was created.


 The foundation java web application was deployed to the existing EPMSystem WebLogic domain.


As this is a second deployment on Foundation the managed server in the cluster is incremented by one.

In this deployment I have configured OHS to a shared drive location, this means there is no need to run the configure web server as the configuration is automatically added.


A quick check of OHS WebLogic proxy configuration file confirms this so all that is required is to restart OHS and refresh Workspace

Within the WebLogic admin console the new managed server which has been deployed to the existing “FoundationServices” cluster can be viewed.


I ran a registry report to display the components that have been deployed and added to the Shared Service registry which I will compare against when the instance has been removed.


The main entries that were added to the registry are:

HOST : EPMSCALEOUT
Instance: epmscaleout
Shared Services / Workspace Web Applications
Instance Tasks configuration for Shared Services/Workspace


A deployment report was also run so this could be compared a report run after the instance being removed.


The main entries displayed in the report in relation to the scaled out Web application deployments:

WebLogic entries for Shared Services/Workspace on the EPMSCALEOUT machine.
Fusion Middleware home and location for the epmscaleout instance
Instance home directory information for epmscaleout


All the information has now been gathered so it is time to remove the instance on the machine the instance is hosted.


If you are running windows then the instance can be removed from a start menu option.

Alternatively it can be run from command line by changing to EPM_ORACLE_INSTANCE/bin and executing:

configtool.bat/sh – remove

If you are removing an instance on a machine hosting the WebLogic admin server then the managed server should be stopped before running the configurator, if like I am removing an instance on a machine which is not hosting the admin server then the admin server should be up and running.

As a test I am not going to start up the admin server and see what happens when running the remove.


Interesting that it states that if it is the last component for the product then the database schema will be removed which is not included in the list of tasks that will be performed, it is not something I have tested out yet though.

After proceeding the command window closed without any error messages, so what happened?


Luckily the process is logged and the logs can be found at EPM_ORACLE_INSTANCE\diagnostics\logs\uninstall


The summary information can be found in unconfigure_summary.log and it clearly states the process failed.

For detailed information then configTool-unconfigure.log can be checked.

[2013-05-07T00:05:50.971+01:00] [EPMCFG] [ERROR] [EPMCFG-01020] [oracle.EPMCFG] [tid: 10] [ecid: 0000JtyCufZFg4WFLz7U8A1HYC5n000000,0] [SRC_CLASS: com.hyperion.cis.config.AbstarctAntDeploymentApiAdapter] Error: [[
Weblogic domain on the remote host FUSION11 not available


The error message indicates as expected that the Weblogic admin server was not available.

Next I ran the remove again but with the admin server running.


Now this is what the command window should output for a successful remove but the windows closes pretty much straight after the last message is displayed so if you blink you will miss it.


The summary log does not indicate a failure so this can be taken a successful removal of the instance and a few checks can be carried out to confirm.


In the admin console the managed server has been removed.


The instance entries from the start menu have been removed.


Comparing a registry report to the one before the instance was removed you can see that some entries still remain, I would have expected the instance tasks to have been removed as I don’t see why they would be required anymore, also even though this was the only instance on the machine the host information still remains, the registry has always had this annoying feature of storing up host, it is possible if you want the registry to be clean to  remove the host entries using the epmsys_registry utility.


Comparing the deployment report to the one run before removing the instance it highlights the entries for the Weblogic web application, FMW home and Instance directory have been removed.

I also ran the registry cleanup utility but it seemed to fail on the last step with a java error.


I am not yet sure if this relates to me removing the instance but I will update once I had more time to look at it.

Even though OHS was configured to a shared file location it does not look like it was automatically reconfigured to remove cluster entries.


As you would expect running the configure web server option again in the configurator resolves this, maybe it will be automatically added to the remove instance functionality in the future.

Update 20/05/2013 - Oracle are aware of the issue when running the registry cleanup utility after adding/removing instances, they are also aware that the OHS WebLogic config file is not updated after removing an instance, both these issues should be fixed in future PSUs.

I checked the file structure under EPM_ORACLE_INSTANCE and besides the diagnostics folder there were only a few empty folders still remaining.

I know this was only a simple test but hopefully it provides an insight into the new functionality.

3 comments:

  1. Is this documented anywhere? Do you know if running 'configtool.sh -remove' the same as running unconfigure.sh?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Jerry, yes it is documented - http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E40248_01/epm.1112/epm_deployment_options/frameset.htm?ch07.html

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi,

    I tried this process to remove an HFM instance in 11.1.2.3 and after removing web applications it just hung there, I left it overnight and noting.

    Is this a known issue?

    ReplyDelete

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