This effort came out of an interest in seeing how long it would take to stand up a minimal environment for Hyperion EPM 11.1.1.3. Although, this is no longer the premier-supported version of Hyperion EPM, I thought it was a good place to start looking into deployment concerns and challenges, since it is the start of the 11g line. I started my experiment with two Virtualbox Windows XP instances: a 4 GB one for the database repository, shared services and Hyperion Financial Reports, and a 1 GB instance for Essbase. Full disclosure: the instances had been created previously, and Oracle Express Edition 11g was already installed on my database/SS server.

So, in total the effort took about 15 hours, including a couple false starts, restarts and rabbit holes. I came away with some tips for future:

  • Make sure you are using a browser which is compatible with your version of Hyperion EPM. I spent an hour trying to figure out why Shared Services was not working, only to discover that 11.1.1.3 does not work with the latest Firefox or Chrome.
  • Do not use server names that include hyphens – they break a lot of processes in the installation. I had to back out and restart because of this, after renaming my servers.
  •  Sequencing matters. Here is what I followed:
    1. Install and configure Foundation/Shared Services first,
    2. Install the various products (HFR, Essbase).
    3. Do a separate install for Essbase Administration Services, after Essbase is installed (including the server, client and EAS client).
    4.  If you wish to install the EAS web client, make sure you have an app server installed first (Weblogic, Tomcat, etc).

This was a fun effort, I’m looking forward to deploying a few other apps in the instance, as well as bumping it up a version to the currently supported EPM 11.1.2.3 in future exercises.