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former_member18062
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert

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

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