How to Create a OBIEE Virtual Machine on a Shoestring

 

It is sometimes useful to have an all in one OBIEE 11g virtual machine for purposes such as training. The following steps show how a bare bones OBIEE 11g and Oracle 11g database was setup on a Windows 2003 SP2 32-bit platform with 3600 MB RAM.

Inventory:

• Vmware Player 5.0
• Windows 2003 SP2 32-Bit
• Oracle 11gR2
• RCU 11.1.1.6.0
• OBIEE 11.1.1.6.0

 

I setup the initial virtual machine with: 3600 MB Ram, 2 CPUs, and 50 GB disk (c: 10 GB, d: 40 GB for OBIEE 11g software, Database software, and database itself).

I setup the network mode to Host Only.

After installing Windows 2003 x32 SP2, copy the software installs to a folder (eg. d:\stage) using a network share.

Then, install the database, there is a minimalist guide to installing Oracle here

ie. Install the db software first, then create a customized, minimalist, database.

Some parameters of note that I used:

Default to standard SID = ORCL

Disabled Enterprise Manager

 

Install only OLAP and Spatial packages

In Standard Database Components, remove APEX.

• 600 MB SGA, Automatic allocation
• ALF32UTF8 character set

Note – do not use 4096 bytes block size, the RCU install will fail. Stick to 8192 bytes.

Create the default listener and local naming entry using Net Configuration Assistant.Install the Microsoft Loopback adaptor on IP address 10.10.10.10

After installing the RCU, do a simple OBIEE 11g Install:

For testing purposes, I install also Firefox and Flash Player.

The results:

I have 4.45 Gb free on my D: drive after all the installations (installer files still present too).

Remove the installers, and this pumps up to circa 22 Gb.

With oracle db, OBIEE running, and Sample App Lite, we have the following memory profile, still 1.5 Gb free:

And we can see that we have about 1.5 Gb of Oracle software memory footprint. (Weblogic, database, BI system components)