Technology Blogs by SAP
Learn how to extend and personalize SAP applications. Follow the SAP technology blog for insights into SAP BTP, ABAP, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP HANA, and more.
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
former_member18062
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
50,211

Hello SCN,

In this blog, I will go through the steps necessary to setup and install SAP BI 4.1 SP01 on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x system.

  • This will be a basic and default (full) installation of BI4.1 SP01 using the bundled Sybase SQL Anywhere database and Tomcat 7.0 Application server.
  • This blog assumes that you're installing from scratch and that no pre-existing BI products have been installed previously.
  • This is also documented in the wiki area for future reference: here
  • For more complex configurations and installations please refer to the SCN PATTERN BOOKS

*Note: Fedora, CentOS or other distributions which are not explicity RHEL are not supported.


Resources:

Red Hat Software Downloads
SAP BI Software Downloads
SAP BI 4.1 Product Documentation
SAP BI 4.1 Supported Platforms (PAM)

Prerequisites:

General

  • Only 64-bit Operating systems are supported
  • Installation target must have adequate disk space ~20gb (will require much more to account for applying patches and SP's).
  • Temporary filesystem space ~2gb
  • Create a user account and group under which the BI4.1 SP01 software will run.  This account does not require root privileges
  • Locale: Configure a supported UTF-8 locale by setting LC_ALL and LANG environment variables.

    Example:

    export LANG=en_US.utf8
    export LC_ALL=en_US.utf8
  • ulimit settings must be set to unlimited by using the ulimit command or editing /etc/security/limits.conf manually.
  • read, write and execute permission to the installation target destination directory

    For a complete list of requirements and a Final Checklist please reference:
    SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform 4.1 Support Package 1 Installation Guide for Unix...

Prerequisite Red Hat libraries:

Before installing on Red Hat Linux, you must ensure all the required libraries are installed. Ensure you have root access, then use the Yum software installation tool to run the following commands:

yum install compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-69.el6.i686
yum install compat-libstdc++-33.i686
yum install compat-libstdc++-33-3.x86_x64
yum install glibc.i686
yum install libstdc++.i686
yum install libX11-1.3-2.el6.i686

*Note:
Failure to apply these prerequisite libraries can cause instability in the BI4.1 environment. 
Please reference these KBA articles to learn more about the consquences:

1692724 - Cannot open Shared object file: No such file or directory

1692679 - Bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory

1692695 - Error while loading shared libraries: libX11.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such...

1875824 - LDAP Plugin missing from CMC on Red Hat Operating systems

Difficulties installing via YUM? See:

1972307 - Error: Protected multilib versions when installing BI4 prerequisite libraries

Checking Prerequisites

Checking to see if these libraries are installed is quick and simple using the following commands:

cat /etc/redhat-release
ulimit
locale
rpm -qa compat-libstdc++*
rpm -qa glibc
rpm -qa libstdc++
rpm -qa libX11

The output should be similar to this:

Running Setup

To launch setup, navigate to the media for BI4.1 SP01 and execute ./setup.sh

Installation screens:

Troubleshooting

Survey Script

When troubleshooting BI 4.1 installation issues on linux it is essential to download Doug's survey.sh script.  This will examine several different dimensions of your Redhat system and save the analysis to an HTML file.  This will also include the installation logfiles for examination.  This makes identifying a problem in a linux environment very easy.

The survey script can be found attached to this KBA:

1681036 - Using the survey script to assist support


Installation logs

During setip, installer will create a subfolder in /tmp to contain the setupengine.log until the installation is completed.  Once setup has completed, these logs will be moved to the ./InstallData directory of your installation target folder (example: /home/boeuser/BI41/InstallData/ ).

Reviewing the setupengine.log post-instal is essential to understand what may have occured.  The survey script above makes this easy by collecting the logfile for you.


Common Issues

Most installation issues are due to missing prerequisites wether these are the configuration steps listed above, or missing libraries.  In some cases its found that the library installed may be for the incorrect architechure (i686 vs. x86_x64).

Other issues can be caused by the installer finding 3rd party products and libraries via the LD_LIBRARY_PATH or LIBPATH.  Removing these extra entries from these environment variables may be necessary.


SAP KBA Search

Any error messages that you will encounter during the installer or identify in the setupengine.log may already documented by SAP Product Support.

SAP BI KBA SEARCH

28 Comments
mike_howles4
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

This is pretty awesome.  I'm interested in this usage to run in a VMWare instance on my workstation as a developer sandbox.  While I don't expect it to be blazing fast, I'm assuming doing this in Linux will be lower overhead in a VM than a Windows OS (and cheaper of course).

 

Thanks!

mike_howles4
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

As an update, I was able to install this on CentOS 5.6 after some shell script tweaking (not supported, I know, but not like I'm using this for anything other than a sandbox)  Thanks again.

former_member18062
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Hi Michael,

 

Instaling BI on a VMware for sandox is a great way to get familiar with the product.

 

Yes, while its possible to install on CentOS/Fedora, the libraries which BI requires wont always be 100% compatible.  Just be aware that even for a sanbox you might not be able to resolve some of these problems.

 

Your sanbox may have report rendering issues or servers not starting etc.  We've had problems with library compatibility even in supported RH6.x OS' with previous release of BI4.0 (we couldnt support CR2011 servers due to incompatible libraries... as indicated in the PAM).

 

If you are running VM on your workstation, I'd also recomend resizing or stopping your APS service.  The APS service contains about 27 sub-services, some which you will not need.  This can save you some resources/RAM.

 

Have a look at this doc:

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-31711

 

Cheers,

Brian

mike_howles4
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Yep, I totally understand any problems I run across shouldn't be representative of the product.  I also turned off nearly all APS services except whatever I'm working on.  I'm running this all in VMWare Player (not even VMWare Workstation) so I'm limited to 3.6GB RAM (hey, you get what you pay for when it's free!) but the server does start up and I'm able to get in there and poke around and do what I need

Derek_Fox
Contributor
0 Kudos

Hi Brian

 

After you installed the BI system on the RHEL system, did you have any issues connecting with client tools afterwards, for example, IDT, Webi Rich Client, etc..

 

Regards

 

Derek

former_member18062
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Hi Derek,

 

After attaching my Win7 system running the BI4.1 SP01 client tools, the only issue I encountered is documented here:

 

http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1690238

 

After making these changes, I was able to successfully login using the client tools.  I've also just modified this KBA to make it more relevant for BI4.0 and BI4.1.

 

Hope it helps,

-Brian

Derek_Fox
Contributor
0 Kudos

Hi Brian

 

Thank you for the KBA number, this definitely describes the behaviour I was experiencing with our test Linux system.

 

Regards

 

Derek

denis_konovalov
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Great job, as usual. Keep em coming !

Former Member
0 Kudos

Thank you for this guidance. I am facing at the moment the task to upgrade from BusinessObjects XI 3.1 SP4  (12.4.0.966) running on a Server with 6 GB RAM and 64-bit OS (Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 5). We would like to upgrade to 4.1 SP2.

So I read your guide and also checked the PAM. The minimum RAM size is recommended with 16 GB. So I was asking myself and also checked some forums wether it is enough to buy some stacks and Upgrade the Hardware to 16 GB or do we need more, e.g. if the database (Oracle 11g) is also running on the same server.

 

The question is, does BO 4.1 need the whole RAM or are those 16 GB we would have enough to run the system? Thanks for your support!

 

Cheers, Bhagat

former_member18062
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Hi Bhagat,

 

Excellent question.  When it comes to questions regarding sizing and hardware requirements, its difficult to give a straight answer without knowing how heavily you are (and will be) using the BI system.

 

If you're building a test system, you definitely "can" get the software installed with less than 16GB of RAM, but you will have some performance problems.

 

...Especially with having the Oracle database on the same system.  Remember that XI3.1 is 32-bit where BI4.x will be a 64-bit platform, so it can be more resource intensive where needed (as is needed with some of our Analytical Reporting applications).

 

Here are some good resources to review related to BI4 hardware / sizing to help you on your way:

 

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-33183

 

Regards,

Brian

mike_howles4
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

16GB basically will let the CMS and Management/Repo/Scheduling services, and an APS with Webi, CR, and Dashboards services run.  If your DB and Tomcat are also running on the same box, it will crawl, no question about it.  If you are a BW customer, you also have to consider MDAS services.  Don't forget about DSL Bridge and DF Services also.

 

Don't forget that then you also have Explorer and Design Studio addons that you need to account for if those are in your scope.

 

RAM is cheap, max it out!

Former Member
0 Kudos

Thanks Brian, the installation will take place on the DEV environment not on Production. I checked if we could put in more RAM but the customer has only 16 GB, so lets give it a try as they are only working with Webi.

Former Member
0 Kudos

Thanks Michael. We will try it on the Dev environment and lets see how it works. On the Production side we won´t face any issues (at least in regards of Hardware).

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hi Brian I have opened another Discussion but I think I will ask you directly.

 

Our client has installed RHEL5.4 which according to PAM should be fine. Problem is the libraries are not available. Is there a difference between RHEL 5.4 and RHEL6? Can I start the installation w/o installing the above mentioned libraries ?

 

Thanks again

 

https://scn.sap.com/thread/3468114

former_member18062
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Hi Bhagat,

 

As far as I know, one difference will be in the name of the library itself (el6 in the filename signifies Enterprise Linux 6).

 

el5 should have an equivalent library if you attempt to run something like:

'yum install compat-libstdc++'  - it should find it if you're connected to the RHN.

 

This isnt documented anywhere I could find, so thanks for pointing this out (I'll try and have the install docs updated).

 

-Brian

former_member195446
Participant
0 Kudos

Hi Brian,

 

Nice document..

 

I am new to Linux Environment with BO,can you please suggest me selection of Linux server hosting company.


what is the best Linux server i need to choose and why?

which linux server i can sugget to the client when its relates to BO Server Installation on Linux.

 

can you please share any documents.

Former Member
0 Kudos

From one Brian to another...this was a great, step by step process.

 

You rule Brian!

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hello; I'm new to SAP BI, especially running on Redhat Linux.  I would like to use a barcode font and don't know how to import or load.  Can anyone provide any direction on where to get information or instructions?

 

Thanks - Steve

former_member18062
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Hi Steve,

 

Thanks for reading my article.

 

For your barcode question, you should start a discussion topic on the BI-platform area here:BI Platform and we will try and get you an answer.


Thanks,

Brian

Former Member
0 Kudos

This was a great resource!  I really helped me jumpstart my install on Red Hat 6.5.

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hi Brian,

 

Thanks for the information. Very useful article.

 

Could you please let us know if we can install BI 4.1 on a mount point on linux?

 

Thanks

Shubha

Former Member
0 Kudos

FYI: I had to change the configuration of YUM to get all of the needed packages, using the following command:

 

yum-config-manager --enable rhui-REGION-rhel-server-extras rhui-REGION-rhel-server-optional

Former Member
0 Kudos

yes we can do that activity.

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hi Team,

 

We installed SAP BO 4.1 SP1 on linux server but unable to reach CMS on port of 6400.

Kindly refer the same in below image .

 

 

 

 

 

Suggest me accordingly..

 

 

Regards

Narasimhulu M

former_member197738
Participant
0 Kudos
Hi Brain,

Thanks for such a great post as always.

 

I was trying to install BI4.2 sp5 on SuseLinux mount on VMworkstation.

I ran into below error of missing lib. I did install similar library after some google search, but still the issue persist.

Can suggestion where i can get the below specific library?

I did check the compatibility though at below KBA

https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/0002524542

 
Installation aborted. The following libraries are required to run the installer:32bit glibc package containing libc.so.6 (eg. glibc-32bit-2.11.1-0.17.4). 32bit libstdc++ package containing libstdc++.so.5 (eg. libstdc++33-3.3.3-11.9).

Appreciate your time, thanks
denis_konovalov
Active Contributor
0 Kudos
 

Have you tried Suse forums or support  ?
former_member197738
Participant
0 Kudos
Denni - thanks for your speedy response.

 

Not yet, let me jump on that right away. Will update the thread on my progress.
0 Kudos
Hello All,

We have been trying to install SAP BusinessObjects on RedHat Enterprise Linux 7.2 Server (VM) environment. We initially used PuTTY to access the server remotely for the installation.

On our attempts using PuTTY, the installation got stuck at 82%. But when we tried installing via Terminal directly on the RedHat Server itself, it worked and we have now successfully installed SAP BO 4.2 SP4 on Linux VM.

While the installation has gone through now, we still haven't been able to root cause why the installation got stuck when we were trying from PuTTY. We checked the server logs but found no errors. Please can someone suggest what the reason for this could be ?

Now, with all the BO services, tomcat and sql anywhere started, we are able to access and login to CMC, BI Launchpad only from the browser of RedHat Linux Server. The login pages for CMC and BI LaunchPad cannot be accessed via browser from a desktop / client machine which is on the same network as that of the RedHat Server.

Please note: Firewall of the Redhat Server is off.

Thanks,

Kushal Pardeshi