OCI - Installing EPM Automate on Always Free Oracle Linux

Using Oracle's FREE Cloud VMs to Store your EPM Cloud Snapshots

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past month you will know that Oracle have released their "Oracle Cloud Free Tier". This consists of the following services FOR FREE!
https://www.oracle.com/uk/cloud/free/

I've enjoyed playing with ADW and APEX, an incredible combo which will enable us to build simple applications to enhance our existing EPM Cloud apps.

The two free Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute VMs also caught my attention. These could of course be used for a multitude of things, one of which could be a host for EPM Automate and a location to store EPM Cloud snapshots.

Installing EPM Automate on Oracle Linux OCI

There are several blogs out there on how to setup your instance. Here is a good one from APEX guru Dimitri:
https://dgielis.blogspot.com/2019/09/free-oracle-cloud-6-create-vm-instance.html
So, once you've got your VM running you can install EPM Automate.

• Download the Linux EPM Automate installer. The link can be found in the PBCS user name drop-down:

• Download the Java JDK for Linux from here for example (the JDK doesn't come bundled with the Linux EPM Automate version)
• Copy both installers to your Oracle Linux VM using your favourite file transfer tool (WinSCP for instance)

Installing the JDK on Oracle Linux VM

JRE version 1.7 or higher is required.

This is nice and simple. The installer is just a compressed file so you can extract it to your preferred location:

tar -zxvf <filename>

e.g.

tar -zxvf jdk_ri-8u40-b25-linux-x64-10_feb_2015.tar.gz

I extracted mine to /GS_software/java-se-8u40-ri

Installing EPM Automate on Oracle Linux VM

This is again nice and simple. The EPM Automate is a compressed file, extract it to your preferred location:

tar -xvf epmautomate.tar

I extracted mine to /GS_software/epmautomate

Setting your JAVA_HOME

You'll need to set the JAVA_HOME in your user profile or as a shell environment variable.

Running EPM Automate

So, we've extracted the JDK and the EPMAUTOMATE archive, we should be good to go right?

WRONG!

I got the following error when trying to login:

EPMAT-7:Unable to connect to https://planning-blahblah.pbcs.em3.oraclecloud.com Root Cause: java.lang.RuntimeException: Unexpected error: java.security.InvalidAlgorithmParameterException: the trustAnchors parameter must be non-empty.

 1. Ensure that you are using the correct URL.

 2. If your organization requires the use of a proxy server to connect to the internet, verify that "proxyHost" and "proxyPort" environment variables are correctly set.

 Ex: setenv proxyHost <proxyhostname>,setenv proxyPort <proxyport>

The problem here is that we don't have the SSL certificate installed into our java keystore.

Importing the SSL Certificate into the Java Keystore

Open a browser and connect to your PBCS URL

https://planning-blahblah.pbcs.em3.oraclecloud.com/HyperionPlanning

Make sure you actually login to PBCS. If you download the certificate on the login page it will be the wrong certificate and you will get a bogus error like this: "EPMAT-7: Unable to connect. Unsupported Protocol: HTTPS".

• Once you've logged in to EPM Cloud click on the browser padlock-> connection ->more information:

• Click on 'View Certificate':

• Click on Export and save the .crt file to your desktop
• Upload it using WinSCP to your VM e.g. /GS_software/epmautomate/pbcs_em3_oraclecloud_com.crt

We now need to import the certificate into our Java cacerts keystore:

• Change directory to jre/bin 

cd /GS_software/java-se-8u40-ri/jre/bin

• Run the keytool command to import the certificate:

./keytool -import -file /GS_software/epmautomate/bin/pbcs_em3_oraclecloud_com.crt -storepass changeit -keystore /GS_software/java-se-8u40-ri/jre/lib/security/cacerts -alias pbcs_em3_oraclecloud_com

Now test EPM Automate again:

It works!

So you have a FREE Oracle VM on which you can run your EPM Automate commands and save your EPM Cloud PBCS snapshots for FREE! Zero installs required in your customer data centre.

Did I mention it was FREE?

If you're not comfortable with Linux or simply haven't got the time then our support team at Brovanture will gladly manage this service for you.

Thanks :)