A Middleware home consists of the Oracle WebLogic Server home, and, optionally, one or more Oracle homes, including EPM Oracle home. A Middleware home can reside on a local file system or on a remote shared disk that is accessible through Network File System (NFS).
The Middleware home location is defined during the first product installation on the computer. Subsequent installations on the computer use the previously defined location. The default installation directory is Oracle/Middleware. The Middleware home location is referred to as MIDDLEWARE_HOME throughout this document.
An Oracle home contains installed files necessary to host a specific product, and resides within the directory structure of the Middleware home. The EPM Oracle home contains files for EPM System products.
Components of EPM System products are installed in the EPM Oracle home directory under the Middleware home. The default EPM Oracle home location is MIDDLEWARE_HOME/EPMSystem11R1. In addition, common internal components used by the products are installed in EPM Oracle home. Choose the location carefully to ensure that the location has enough disk space for all products that you are installing on the machine. You cannot change the location.
The EPM Oracle home location is defined in the system environment variable called EPM_ORACLE_HOME. The EPM Oracle home location is referred to as EPM_ORACLE_HOME throughout this document.
In a distributed environment, the EPM Oracle home directory structure must be the same on each machine.
Additionally, during configuration, some products deploy components to the EPM Oracle instance defined during configuration. The default location for the EPM Oracle instance is MIDDLEWARE_HOME/user_projects/epmsystem1. The EPM Oracle instance location is referred to as EPM_ORACLE_INSTANCE throughout this document. Deployed components include:
Data and applications
Deployed Web applications
Log files
Web applications are deployed to MIDDLEWARE_HOME/user_projects/domains/domainName.
Typically, if you are installing all products on a single machine, for the first product you configure, you create a new EPM Oracle instance. For each product after that, you modify the existing instance. If you are installing in a distributed environment, create a new instance with a unique name on each machine.
In a UNIX environment, you can deploy to a shared drive by installing to a shared drive and then configuring each machine to deploy to a different instance. See Deploying to a Shared Drive Environment (UNIX).
If you want to configure multiple instances of Essbase on a machine, see Configuring and Starting Additional Instances of Essbase Server.