Installing Oracle E-Business Suite R12 on Windows 2003

This article and ones to follow are written from the
perspective of someone fairly new to Oracle’s E-Business Suite, described in another
article
as EBS, Oracle Applications and Oracle Apps. You may be an Oracle
DBA charged with setting up a test or evaluation environment, or you may
already be working with EBS, but inherited the setup architecture and have to
investigate what it takes to perform an upgrade.

There are several blogs on the Internet where the
information on how to install EBS is listed, but they’re mostly piecemeal. The
blogs tend to skip essential parts outright, assume you already know what has
to be done via prior experience from having installed or maintained EBS, or they
are written in broken English/chat room talk. My guarantee in this series of articles
is that you will be able to start from scratch and walk away with an up and
running EBS instance using the Vision Enterprises database. The Vision
Enterprises (or VIS) database that can be created during an EBS installation is
EBS’ equivalent of the sample schemas found in the RDBMS product line (HR, OE,
SH, etc.).

Coming from a traditional Oracle DBA background, the
installation process is similar to what you’ve seen before, and is not similar
to what you’ve seen before. Allow me a movie analogy to describe the
difference. The movie “Witness,” starring Harrison Ford, in the scene where
his character punches out the lights of a town bully, and a local man says,
“Never seen anything like that in all my years,” followed by Eli (the father)
saying, “He’s from … Ohio … my cousin.” The local man then says, “Well, them
Ohio Amish sure must be different.” That precisely describes the relationship
between the traditional Oracle DBA world and what you’re about to see in EBS.

The host platform/operating system, and one that is
relatively easy for most people to replicate, is based on 32-bit Windows 2003
Server (R2). If you want to build a test server at home, you can get an
inexpensive PC with a hundreds of gigs of disk space and several gigs of RAM
from lots of places online or from your local computer store. I bought a Lenovo
ThinkCentre A61 (AMD64 dual core) and beefed it up with another 500GB internal
disk drive and 4GB of RAM. Windows 2003 in this configuration will only
recognize the first 4GB of RAM, so don’t go overboard on this purchase. Be sure
to backup the OEM software before installing 2003 (which you can download for
evaluation from Microsoft).

Two ways to get the software for EBS are to order a media
pack from Oracle (about $60) or download it from Oracle Technology Network. The
interface in the EBS area of OTN (E-Delivery)
is wildly different from anything else at OTN (your first introduction to the
Ohio Amish).

Choose a language and click Continue. Fill out the Export
Validation page and then you’ll be ready to select the software suite for
download.

Select the E-Business Suite product pack for 32-bit Windows
and part number B37233-03 for release 12.0.4.

There are (as of this writing) 48 separate downloads to
perform. First the good news: you don’t need all 48. Second, more good news: if
using Firefox, get the DownThemAll
add-in to manage the downloads. You’ll select which items to download and then
let the add-in do its job.

Here is what you’ll NOT need:

Oracle Database Lite 10g Release 2
(10.2.0.1.1) for Microsoft Windows (32-bit) CD

B30674-01

456M

Oracle Governance, Risk, and Compliance
Manager 7.8

V13399-01

78M

Stellent UCM Content Server 7.5.2 for Linux

B42463-01

705M

Stellent UCM Content Server 7.5.2 for UNIX
based Systems

B42464-01

1.4G

Stellent UCM Content Server 7.5.2 for
Microsoft Windows (32-bit)

B42465-01

812M

Oracle Governance, Risk and Compliance
Controls Suite – Disk 1

V12253-01

962M

Oracle Governance, Risk and Compliance
Controls Suite for Microsoft Windows – Disk 2 (Part 1 of 2)

V12227-01
Part 1 of 2

1.8G

Oracle Governance, Risk and Compliance
Controls Suite for Microsoft Windows – Disk 2 (Part 2 of 2)

V12227-01
Part 2 of 2

1.2G

Oracle Deal Management

V12266-01

5.3M

Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2.0
Linux Programs (DVD) (Part 1 of 4)

B42085-01
Part 1 of 4

660M

Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2.0
Linux Programs (DVD) (Part 2 of 4)

B42085-01
Part 2 of 4

372M

Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2.0
Linux Programs (DVD) (Part 3 of 4)

B42085-01
Part 3 of 4

620M

Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2.0
Linux Programs (DVD) (Part 4 of 4)

B42085-01
Part 4 of 4

330M

The easiest thing to do is download everything and extract
each download individually into its own folder. Once that is done, you need to
create a stage or installation hierarchy. A representative structure is shown
below.

Under E:\StageR12 (as an example), create five folders named
as shown above. After the downloads are extracted, notice that most of the
extract folders will show oraDB (as an example) when the cursor hovers over the
folder (like showing properties). The startCD folder will have one “Disk”
directory placed in it. Navigate to where the “start here” download was
extracted and drag the Disk1 folder to just under the startCD folder. In a
similar fashion, there will be folders named Disk1 through Disk9 under oraApps,
Disk1 through Disk4 under oraDB, Disk1 and Disk2 under oraAS (use oraAS, not oraiAS
as shown in some places), and finally, Disk1 through Disk35 under oraAppDB.
When finished, the folders and product IDs should be arranged as shown below.
The B or V-whatever folders will be largely empty, as their respective Diskn
contents have been moved up a few levels. I left the folders in place in the
table below so you can see where each one should be extracted to or into with
respect to the five top-level folders. Also, you do not need the component.label
or dvd.label files.

startCD

oraApps

oraDB

oraAS

oraAppDB

The installation guide mentions using a Perl script
(adautostg.pl) to create the staging area. It won’t work on this installation
option because we’re not using a CD/DVD location, so the input for specifying
the location of the drive (while the script is running) fails. You must
manually place the files/folders as shown.

Two to three additional pre-installation steps require
installing Cygwin (UNIX Toolkit), a runtime
version of Visual Studio
(mainly for Visual C/C++), and Perl. The Cygwin installation/setup steps are
described in MetaLink note 414992.1, “Using Cygwin to Maintain Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12
on Windows.”

Add <drive>:\cygwin\bin to the path environment
variable, and perform the following copy operations:


Copy gawk.exe to awk.exe
Copy grep.exe to egrep.exe
Copy make.exe to gnumake.exe
Copy gcc.exe to cc.exe

The Microsoft component can be downloaded from here. Specifically, you want
the Visual C++ Express Edition. When it installs, the folder tree should look
like this:

Add C:\V98\VC\bin to the path environment variable.

To get Perl, go here
and then click Get ActivePerl in the top right corner. Obtaining Perl is not
essential at this point, but you will need it later. You can test the Perl
installation as shown in the installation guide (use the options to list out
the version). If you encounter errors about mismatched libraries, see if you
have PERL5LIB set (from other Oracle product installations such as the 10g
companion). If set, remove this variable.

In the next part of this series, we’ll start the
installation process and examine the installation architecture.

»


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Steve Callan

Steve Callan
Steve Callan
Steve is an Oracle DBA (OCP 8i and 9i)/developer working in Denver. His Oracle experience also includes Forms and Reports, Oracle9iAS and Oracle9iDS.

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