First things first, what are you installing Essbase for?
The answer to this question makes a big difference in planning your install. Some of you are installing Essbase at a large corporate level with hundreds of users and want to leverage the best OLAP tool for forecasting, budgeting, planning, reporting and analysis. Maybe you are installing Essbase for your workgroup because funding and staff numbers are down but the workload is higher than ever although you still need to get more done with less. So Essbase can help your team become more efficient and still get the job done right. Or are you that consultant or closet techie just planning to install Essbase on your laptop to play around with it and be able to say you have the latest and greatest version installed. The larger your installation is and the more people it will affect then the more planning and discovery you should be doing before beginning your Essbase implementation.
Depending on your answer to the first question will affect your plan for installing Essbase as well as how you should be answering the next question: “What hardware and software options are best for you?”
There are many different options here for you to choose from so I will never be able to cover them all but I will go over a few important things to consider.
- Hardware: Make sure that you have the right hardware for the right application. Your performance will suffer greatly if you do not have the appropriate hardware for your install. In other words make sure (double and triple check) you purchase or are using hardware that can handle the load of work you will be putting on it. Be sure to check the Oracle documentation for hardware requirements
- Windows, Linux, etc. : I’m not going to pick sides on this one. No matter who you talk to they have a good reason why they use one operating system over another. The only thing to keep in mind here is that even though Essbase works on both Windows and Linux there are still many other Hyperion applications that require a Windows server. So if you plan to install other Hyperion components on the same server as Essbase make sure it is compatible with your operating system.
- 32-bit vs. 64-bit: 64-bit is the way that many are going currently for better performance but keep in mind that some applications are not supported in 64-bit yet. Again reference the above mentioned Oracle documentation for compatibility.
- VMware: There are many pros but also some cons to VM. VM is a great tool and I would recommend leveraging it if you are able. It allows you to have multiple OS environments on the same computer and allows for easier maintenance, high availability and quick disaster recovery. If you are looking for a good solution for a testing environment VM is definately a great solution. Now with all of these great things there are some drawbacks to VM also. The first being that it is very resource intensive. So if you are using VM you need to go big. Make sure that your hardware is capable of handling these intensive needs. (I had to get a new laptop with 4GB of RAM and Dual Core Processor to handle some of our demo Hyperion images and this is for ONE user try keeping up with a few hundred users). Also there is a bit of a learning curve to VM. Configuring the image is somewhat of an art so it might take you a couple tries before you get the settings right. There is a lot of information on VM on the web so check it out.
Tune in for the next blog post as I will chat about the actual installation process and some design considerations.
