EPM 11.1.2.2 Installation

For the last four years I have written a blog about the installation of each release of EPM 11 and this year there is going to be no exception as 11.1.2.2 has recently been released.

This release is more than just a bunch of fixes as it brings in new products, a multitude of product enhancements and changes to installation and configuration which I will be covering today.

This blog is going to be around highlighting where there are changes from the previous release and not a detailed installation guide as there are a number of documents now available that help cover that area.

I apologise if the blog contains any inaccuracies as a lot of it is new and I may have misunderstood a few details.

First I think it is worth going through a number of the new features and changes that I have picked out of the documentation.

“IBM WebSphere 7.0.0.19+ is now supported as an application server.” – I know deployment to WebSphere has been on the cards for a while and it is now supported, the deployment is not through the EPM configurator and there is a script available to deploy the web apps, the full process to follow is available here.

FireFox 10.x+ and Internet Explorer 9 are now supported Web browsers. – A big leap for the support of FireFox as 11.1.2.1 supported 3.5+, though still not supported for FDM.  IE9 is not supported on XP SP3.

I think the browser versions are going to play a big part if you are implementing Planning or HFM as they use new ADF interfaces which are optimised for IE9 and Firefox 10

Microsoft Office 2010 64 bit is now supported.

“After completing an EPM System deployment, you can generate a deployment report that provides information about configured Web applications, Web servers, databases, and data directories used by EPM System. This report can help you troubleshoot issues that might arise in your deployment.” – I have already seen a presentation of this feature and I will provide an example after I have gone through the configuration.

“The Oracle Enterprise Manager “Fusion Middleware Control” is now installed and deployed with EPM System. You can use this tool to manage the WebLogic domain and all Java Web applications in EPM System out of the box.”  - This was available in previous releases by extending the WebLogic domain which I blogged about here and now you don’t even have to worry as it is all configured automatically.

“The EPM System Media pack on Oracle Software Delivery Cloud has been simplified. Software downloads have been merged together.” – I will go through this shortly.

“Installation of Oracle HTTP Server is now optional. If you choose not to install Oracle HTTP Server, for example in a development environment, Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Installer installs an embedded WebLogic HTTP Server as part of Oracle Hyperion Foundation Services that acts as a proxy server. In a production environment, Oracle recommends that you install Oracle HTTP Server for use with Oracle WebLogic Server or IBM HTTP Server for use with WebSphere. You can also install and manually configure Apache HTTP Server with WebLogic Server.” – Interesting to see that there are number of additional options available instead of just OHS and IIS

“Microsoft Windows Installer (MSI) Client Installers are now provided for Oracle Essbase Client, Oracle Essbase Administration Services Console, Oracle Essbase Studio Console, and Oracle Hyperion Financial Management Client.” – It was possible to get EAS and Studio installers in a 11.1.2.1 patch but it looks like all the clients are finally available as standalone installers.

“Three new “rapid deployment” documents provide step-by-step instructions for building a typical Oracle Hyperion Planning, Financial Management, or Essbase development environment on a single server running Microsoft Windows.” – These documents were actually available in 11.1.2.1 but have now been updated for 11.1.2.2 and merged into the EPM documentation.

“A new Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System Standard Deployment Guide outlines the best-practice approach for deploying EPM System products. This approach is based on creating a base deployment of the products and then scaling out the services to handle the needed capacity.” – This was also available for 11.1.2.1 and has been brought up to date and merged into the standard documentation. Is there such thing as a standard deployment?

A new “ADF” Web application has been added for Financial Management. – Is this the start of FM moving away from being forced down the windows IIS route, once again I think the new ADF interface has been optimised for IE9 and Firefox 10 but I believe you are not forced to use it and can use the existing one.

FM Clusters are now managed centrally through the SS Registry  - “You can now manage Financial Management clusters from one machine. Cluster information is now stored in Oracle Hyperion Shared Services Registry rather than in the Windows registry.”

“The Oracle Hyperion Financial Reporting Print Server is now part of the Financial Reporting Web application. You no longer have to install the Print Server as part of the Financial Reporting Studio installation, and you no longer need Microsoft Office on the Print Server.” – All change again in this release but I believe it is a milestone as at last it looks like the print server is not windows only and there is no need to install a PDF renderer such as GhostScript.

“You can now deploy EPM System Web applications to a single managed server (compact server) in Development, Test, and Production environments. This reduces the overall memory requirement of EPM System and reduces startup time.” – Compact deployment was available in 11.1.2.1 and I blogged about it here but it was only supported for development and was a manual configuration. I will cover this new feature in more detail in a future blog.

There are additional important considerations if you are upgrading to 11.1.2.2 and using planning.

“Oracle Hyperion Calculation Manager has replaced Oracle Hyperion Business Rules as the mechanism for designing and managing business rules, therefore, Business Rules is no longer released with EPM System Release 11.1.2.2” – Business Rules have finally bit the dust so if you are currently using them and planning to upgrade then it is worth investing time getting up to speed with Calc Manager.  I will cover the migration in the near future.

The documentation also states that the server hosting planning must have at least 16GB ram, I am interested to understand if this new release of planning really does require that amount of memory and how does that fit into the world of compact deployment.

There is also reference to having to upgrade your client browser to use the new version of Planning –

“The new, improved Planning user interface requires efficient browsers to handle interactivity provided through Web 2.0 like functionality. In our testing, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, and Firefox 3.x are not sufficient to handle such interactivity, and the responsiveness in these versions of browsers is not as fast as the user interface in the previous releases of Planning. For this reason, we strongly recommend that you upgrade your browser to Internet Explorer 9 or Firefox 10 to get responsiveness similar to what you experienced in previous releases.”

It looks like it still possible to use the existing 11.1.2.1 user interface by setting the property ORACLE_ADF_UI in planning to false.

There have been a number of enhancements with Shared Services -

•    Allows you to rename the default admin account during the deployment process. 
•    After deploying Foundation Services, you can deactivate the default EPM System Administrator account after provisioning another user with the Shared Services Administrator role.

I know the ability to change or rename the admin account has been raised a number of times in the past and it is good to see that Oracle have taken note.

LCM has been given an overhaul with many new features and changes -

•    Simplified User Interface
•    Simplified Migration Definition File
•    Simplified Migration Status Report
•    Automatic Application Shell Creation for Classic Applications
•    Shared Disk Location defined in the configurator
•    Support for ERPi
•    Additional FR artifacts – Annotations, User POV, Batch jobs
•    New replace option for Reporting and Analysis where only artifacts that have a newer last modified timestamp will be imported.

So you can see this release does bring in quite a few additions and changes and that is before even getting into the detail of all the product enhancements.

Anyway on to the installation and the first step is to download the assembles from edelivery, I am going to be installing on a single Windows 2008 R2 x64 machine using Oracle 11g as the repository.

The installation prerequisites are available here and the support matrix here

Straight away you will notice there is a change from the previous releases and many of the files have now been combined.

Parts 1-4 contain the common components and WebLogic, OPMN, Installer plus the core products, 5-7 contains the rest of the product assemblies.

Oracle HTTP Server is a separate download.

The standalone clients are available in one download.

So hopefully this will cause less confusion like in the past with a prime example being the additional contents download.

There are also additional product download available that sit outside of the EPM installer such as DRM, EAL, ODI.

So how do you know which files you require well the easy option is just to download them all or

You can click the README button

This will open a report that breaks down each of the license components such as “Essbase Plus” and provides a list of the files to download.

 

If you expand the Part 6 download you can see that it contains all the essbase related product assemblies.

The clients download includes every standalone client installer which does stand in at 1.6GB in total

Once the files have been downloaded, extract them to the same base location then the process for installation is like in previous versions so the installer is started by running installTool.cmd/sh as an administrator

If you are installing on a distributed environment make sure you read the information here

When the installer starts up it will run through all the prerequisite checks, this screen is slightly different than in previous versions and you don’t have a command window running in the background which you used to have to check to see if any of the checks had failed for such things as UAC.

If any of the checks failed these will now be displayed in an error panel window.

Additional prerequisite checks will also be displayed indicating whether they have passed or failed, these checks look to be the same as previous 11.1.2 releases, though I don’t see the check against OHS anymore which is probably because it used to say that it had passed the check even if it hadn’t.

Select the location for EPM installation.

As this is a new installation only one option is available.

The option to install components by tier has now been removed probably because it was a bit of a waste of time as most of the time choose components individually was selected.

Oracle HTTP Server is not checked by default as it is optional so if you intend of using it then it will need to be selected.

Now that many of the installation files are combined then the likely hood is you are going to be given the option to be able to install lots more products than with previous versions.

All the product components were installed successfully so it is on to the configuration.

Before configuring make sure you have met all the configuration prerequisites outlined here

If you plan on using Web Services with products like APS, FM, PCM then make sure you follow the steps on creating the required schemas using the repository creation utility.

If you are configuring on a distributed environment then make sure you read here

This screen has changed a little in previous versions there the options to create a new instance or modify an instance.

The first step like in previous version is to define the connection information to the Shared Services and Registry database.

As previously the options are available to select to configure all the products at once or individually, if you are going to use a separate schema/database for each product then you will need to configure the products individually.

There are now two additional options for Reporting and Analysis, these are not new in terms of configuration all that happened is the options have been expanded to allow to configure Framework Services and FR RMI ports separately (Configure Database is required if configuring Framework Services)

Besides that the options are pretty much the same as previous 11.1.2 releases so I am not going to go through each of the products and the configuration as there is enough documentation out there to understand the process.

There is a new option to set the LCM Export Import Location which could be on a shared disk, previously the location was fixed unless changes were made to update the path in the Shared Services registry.

As this is the first configuration a new domain is created and the admin server port and admin user details set.

Please note this user is the admin user for WebLogic and nothing to do with Shared Services, in the past there have been a number of posts on the Oracle forums where there has been confusion between the two sets of admin users.

By default “Deploy the web application to a single managed server” is selected, this is known as compact mode which was available in the previous version.

Compact mode is useful is you want to combine a number web applications under one managed server which would be sharing the same JVM and running on one port, this helps reduce the overall memory consumption and start up time though it is worth understanding that if the JVM crashes for any reason then you take out all the products running under that managed server.

If you deselect the option then the web applications will each be deployed to their own managed server and port.

It also looks possible to have a number of web applications to run under one managed server and then have the rest deployed to their own managed server.

I am deploying each of the web applications to their own managed server and will be covering compact deployment and scaling out in a future blog.

If you are deploying FM then you will notice that there is the new ADF web application that is deployed to the same managed server as the Web Services.

 If you are combining all the products into one database then you have the option to use the Shared Services database or configured them to a new schema/database.

If you are configuring a database/schema per product then you would choose first-time configure of database.

Here is another change which I outlined earlier in that you can define the admin account name to be used instead of it being fixed to admin, I am going to be daring and test out the new functionality so I changed it to EPMADMIN.

 Once all the products have been configured then like previously the Configure Web Server should be run.

Configure Web Server component has two additional options, as highlighted earlier it is possible to use the Embedded WebLogic HTTP Server and there is also the option “Setup Registry for manual web server configuration” if you want to manually configure the HTTP server then the relevant config files will be generated in
<MIDDLEWARE_HOME>\user_projects\<instancename>\httpConfig\autogenerated

If you select the embedded WebLogic HTTP server you will see that it is deployed to the foundation port 28080.

I am assuming this means you can access workspace and all the web applications through that port which I am sure has the possibility to cause no end of confusion.

There have not been many changes to the windows services created.

If you deployed any of the web applications to a single managed server a new windows service will be created called "Hyperion EPM Server - Web Application"

Hyperion Financial Management - Web Services has been renamed to Hyperion Financial Management – Web Tier

The print server service is no more and the majority of the service names still start with HyS9

Another nice new feature is the ability to generate a deployment report that lists

•    All logical Web applications and all Web servers that are configured
•    The Web application URL and domain name for each Web application deployment on a machine
•    All databases configured for EPM System
•    The data directories used by EPM System products

To generate the report

Open a command line window and navigate to
<MIDDLEWARE_HOME>/user_projects/<instancename>/bin

Run the command epmsys_registry report deployment

 This by default will generate the report at
<MIDDLEWARE_HOME>\user_projects\<instancename>\diagnostics\reports\deployment_report.html

If you start up the WebLogic admin server and go to http://adminservername:7001/em then you should be able to log into Enterprise Manager with no additional configuration required.

I think I am going to leave it there for today as I need to test out all the products, I will update if I find any serious issues.

Next time I will be testing out applying the maintenance release to an existing 11.1.2.1 environment.