Installing and configuring Oracle Hyperion 11.2.0

Oracle have released the latest version of Hyperion suite in December of 2019. Owing to various personal and professional commitments I didn’t really have a chance to try it. I did get some downtime recently to install and try out the new release. I thought of sharing my experience with you so it might help you in your attempts. I am not going to bore you with the minute details, but will show you the differences in process between this and earlier versions.

  • Windows only — Right off the bat, it should be noted that they have only released it for windows, and not for Linux and other Unix flavors. It is stated that those versions will be released down the track. (As of June-2020)
  • Install as admin — very important to run the installation and other steps by actually selecting “Run as administrator”. Even if the service account used to install is part of the “administrators” group.
  • RCU — We need to run this wizard before configuring the EPM system. This created the repositories required for the weblog server and is absolutely necessary to proceed with configuration.
  • HTTP sever — The Oracle HTTP server is NOT started automatically with the “start” batch script as it would in earlier versions. So, we have to manually start it once the individual services are all up and running.
The following image gives you the high level overview of the installation process.
Assuming that you have downloaded the necessary binaries and prepared the windows servers ( Creating the service account, changing UAC etc.)

The very first step is fairly obvious. Navigate to the installation folder wither from a command line ( in admin mode) or windows explorer. Run install.cmd to initiate the installation.

Installation steps, Screenshots.

While we wait for this process to finish ( It will take quite a bit of time) we can get the relational schema created. This will host the tables for the Hyperion foundation services and other applications.(Calc manager etc.)

Once the schema is created, we basically wait for the installation process to complete.

Just click on finish here, do not click configure.

At this point, we have the software binaries installed, the relational store created and we should be ready to configure our brand new environment, right? Not quite.

Run RCU

Like I said in the main introduction, Oracle introduced RCU for the weblogic server with this version of EPM. So we need to run this BEFORE we can configure the environment. So, let’s get going.

Navigate to the following location where the RCU.bat program resides.

..\Oracle\Middleware\oracle_common\bin

As always, find the rcu.bat file and run it administrator.

Select the “Create repository” option and follow the fairly intuitive steps. Just note that you have to use an account with Sysdba privileges, so you may need your DBA’s help for this step. Note the details you are using in these steps as they need to be added to another file in the next step.

Once the RCU process is successfully completed, edit the RCUSchema.properties file. This file will be read by the configuration tool while creating the weblogic domain.

The file can be found at ..\oracle\Middleware\EpmSystem11R1\common\config\11.2.0

The file looks as below before you edit it. I suggest you make a copy of this template just in case.

Fill out the required fields and once finished, the file should look as below.

Configuring EPM System

Cool, we are now ready for the big step!! Let’s double check we have done everything properly so far, and kick off the configuration tool. I prefer that you run this by starting the config tool separately and not as a continuation of the install tool. I am not sure why, but I only managed to get it to work this way.

In the same folder as above, ..\oracle\Middleware\EpmSystem11R1\common\config\11.2.0, you can find the configtool.cmd file. Run that as “Administrator” to initiate the configuration process. This step is fairly straightforward and the following screenshots show you what needs to be done.

The only main choice you have to make is decide whether to run all servers as one managed server, or individual components. There are merits and demerits to each step, but I prefer to keep them separate. I chose this as it gives me the option to shutdown certain services when I am not using them. ( on a demo machine, with only 16 GB of memory, stopping certain services helps with performance. For instance, if I am only doing something with Hyperion planning, I can safely stop HFM services. )

I am only showing the main steps here, the rest you can figure out yourself. I do the logical address step later, so you will notice in my screenshot that I haven’t checked that box. Once this main process is all finished, check the configure button again, and do the logical address configuration. This is very important, especially when you chose to keep your various components to run separately. You will not be able to navigate to calc manager, planning etc. from shared services unless you have all of them running on the same logical address.

Once the configuration process is completed, do some spot checks to see if things look good. The first I’d check is the services. Ignore the fact that the services look started in the screenshot below. You should see services installed similar to below.

Start EPM System

After visually verifying that the services are installed, proceed to the next step of actually starting the Hyperion EPM services. Again, there is an interesting step here as we will have to fire up the Weblogic admin server before we can start the EPM services. This is only required for the VERY FIRST time we are starting the services and not in the subsequent steps.

Start Weblogic server as administrator.

Navigate to ..\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\doamins\EPMSystem and run the startWeblogic.cmd as administrator.

You can see the progress of weblogic server startup, and once you see the status change to “running” (It may take a while for this to happen, so be patient), proceed to start EPM.

Navigate to ..\\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\epmsystem1\bin and run “Start.cmd” as administrator. This will kick off the process and again, will take a substantial amount of time. Just be patient. You can check the services starting one at a time to make sure the process is actually running.

You can also login to the weblogic console, and check the deployments and servers are starting properly.

Start HTTP  Server

Once you have established that all the components are up and running, there is still one last step before you can access workspace. As I mentioned very early in the post, the Oracle HTTP server doesn’t start as part of the start process. To be able to access Hyperion workspace and other components from the standard port of 19000, we need to manually start the OHS server.

Navigate to ..\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\epmsystem1\httpconfig\ohs and run the following command.

Once this step is finished, we are good to go. You can open your browser, and type in the URL and should be able to login.

Rajesh Valluri is the author of this post, and he can be reached for any queries or feedback at his LinkedIn profile.

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1 Response

  1. June 7, 2020

    […] This post is a quick and simple introduction to configuring Oracle Data Integrator. I am only covering the configuration part because, in this instance, I did not have to install ODI separately. If you have installed Oracle Hyperion EPM 11.2.0, ODI will be installed automatically as part of the FDMEE component. Installation of EPM 11.2.0 on Windows was covered in my earlier blog post here. […]

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