Are you still manually starting services???? The I.T.

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The I.T. Side

The IT Side of Oracle-Hyperion EPM Solutions

Are you still manually starting services????

Starting and Stopping Services One of the most confusing aspects of the Oracle-Hyperion Suite is the basic task of starting and stopping the services in the correct order. Why is this so difficult? Why is there no script? Why so many services? Its SOA As with many enterprise class software packages, Oracle-Hyperion is based on a Service Oriented Architecture or SOA. All components of the Hyperion Suite are glued together by a common foundation and protocols so all of the modules can interact with each other as needed. What this means is that there is inherent flexibility in how one can design and architect an implementation. If you wanted to (not that I would recommend it) you could install all of the modules and products on one machine. Or you can virtually install every component on separate servers in a mix-match of operating systems and configurations. This also allows some products to have multiple instances so that load balancing and scalability is possible. The point is that Oracle leaves it up to us to design an environment that meets our individual needs. Unfortunately, that also means we have a lot of services and processes that we must maintain across many machines all with dependencies to each other. Visualizing the Hyperion foundation gives an insight into these dependencies so we can understand why the start order is so important and it is. I know that for many system admins, it is natural to simply set all services to automatically start at boot but, chances are, that is probably not going to work. Lets think of our foundation so we can start things in the correct order The relational database The Relational database is the backbone of the Hyperion suite. These are a set of databases (or schemas in Oracle) that hold metadata for the product. Shared Services, BI Plus, Essbase Administration Services, HFM, Planning, EPMA, ODI all have separate databases that are required to be up and running when the products are started, and should be started first. Shared Services/OpenLDAP Next is Shared Services. When most products starts, they check in with Shared Services to get a handle on the location of vital components. In some cases services will not even start if Shared Services is not running, and even if they do, they may not function. Also remember, shared Services requires OpenLDAP. Be careful Shared Services can take quite some time to fully come upbe sure to wait a few minutes to ensure it is all the way up before starting the other services. Check by going to: http://<HSS_HOST>:58080/interop The BI reporting and Analysis foundation BI Core, Workspace For BI, the CORE process is key. BI Core is the common foundation for all of BI and acts as a traffic cop for session management, etc. EPMA (if applicable) If you are using EPMA, now is the time to start it. Essbase Related Services 1. Essbase Server, 2. Essbase Administration Services, 3. Essbase Integration Services

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4. Provider Services The rest of BI reporting and Analysis in this order 1. Interactive Reporting 2. Financial Reporting Services 1. FR Server 2. FR RMI 3. FR Scheduler 4. FR Print Server 5. FR Web Server 3. Web Analysis The rest of the products (any order)

Planning and RMI Service Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) Strategic Finance Performance Scorecard Data Relationship Management (DRM) Financial Quality Data Management(FDQM or FDM) Data Integration Management (DIM) Oracle Data Integrator OBIEE

See the Hyperion System 9 install_start_here guide for locations of the start scripts for each of these services. The stop order is the reverse of the start order. Automating Start/Stop through scripts Because of SOA, there are seemingly an infinite number of ways any given Hyperion implementation can be designed. As such, there is no way Oracle can bundle a single start-all or stop-all script for you. Obviously there are many advantages to having a script start and stop everything, most notably for nightly backups and scheduled maintenance. In large environments covering a handful of machines, manually logging into each server and starting/stopping the services can be quite time consuming. Most Hyperion IT admins create a script to start/stop the services, as needed in order. For windows, the sc command is popular. The basic syntax is: Sc \\hostname start|stop Service Name For example a start_all.bat script could begin with the following: echo Starting OpenLDAP sc \\HSS_HOST start OpenLDAP-slapd timeout /t 5 echo Starting Shared Services sc \\HSS_HOST start HyS9SharedServices timeout /t 200 For unix, the easiest way is to create rsh relationships (with .rhosts) between the machines and use rsh to execute remote commands on each server. For example to start OpenLDAP: rsh HSS_HOST <HSS_HOME>/openLDAP/startOpenLDAP.sh sleep 5 Tips:

Create your scripts and play with the TIMEOUT/SLEEP values to optimize the speed but ensure all comes up correctly and functions. Launch start processes in parallel when you can (background in Unix). If there are no dependencies, there is no reason to start them one-by-one and wait.

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Hands Off Administration What if you want to have the Finance department start/stop services as needed, but you dont want to give them access to the servers???? Common problem. One way is the a product called Network Services Manager. See http://www.networkservicesmanager.com/ This tool is a GUI tool that will allow non-technical personnel quickly and easily start/stop services and monitor the status of services on a machine without the need to log into the servers. It can take some time and effort to set up, but once set up, it can make the life of a system admin much easier for environments such as a development environment that requires frequent service restarts. Please let me know if you would like to demo NSM for purchase, I can get you a full-feature evaluation of the software and a significant discount. ~ by Eric Helmer on January 5, 2009. Posted in Hyperion, Uncategorized Tags: Automation, Hyperion, Hyperion Serivces, SOA, starting and stopping

2 Responses to Are you still manually starting services????

1. Good day Eric. Thank you very much for this wonderful insightful blog. I have just started working with Hyperion for a month now and this brief overview you have provided has been most informative. Well done. Kind regards, Danee
Danee said this on February 5, 2009 at 9:20 am | Reply

2. Hi Friend, This is very good blog. I got a lot of knowledge from your documentatios and always follow your web. Have a nice day! Pound
Pound said this on September 29, 2009 at 8:09 pm | Reply

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The I.T. Side: EPM 11.1.2 Infrastructure Update Eric Announces Free Webinar Series 11.1.2 Eric Announces new position at Linium! Announcing Erics 2010 conference tour Setting up automated Essbase Migrations in 11.1.1.3 with Life Cycle Management Eric to present at the first ever joint Dallas Hyperion SIG and DOUG BI Summit Meeting OAUG Hyperion SIG to put on Regional Solutions Mini-conferences High Availability Strategy for Oracle EPM Version 11 Eric in Oracle Magazine What I like and Dislike about Version 11 Catch Erics Session at Kaleidoscope The OAUG Hyperion SIG Meeting Another Collaborate conference is officially in the history books Dont Miss Erics upcomming presentation Collaborate 09 And Knowing is Half the Battle

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