2 Preparing for Installation

There are certain preliminary questions to be raised by the installer of HTB to the customer and the customer's IT staff. It is essential that these are addressed before the actual installation to ensure that HTB is installed properly and operates as expected by the customer. The answers to the questions help you determine which products you need as well as help resource planning and scheduling.

This section contains the following topics:

Operating System and Platform Details
Additional Software and Product Components

2.1 Operating System and Platform Details

The operating system and hardware platform are important details to plan for. Performance and upgradability are factors that are affected by this planning. All decisions may affect the support of your implementation so it is always important to review all the decisions by consulting the Certify tab on My Oracle Support to assure that Oracle E-Business Suite and your database are supported. HTB is an E-Business Suite application and thus is supported in accordance with the 12.1.1 release of E-Business Suite.

The following questions are intended to help with the selection of your operating system and server choices. If in doubt, it is always good to consult your Sales Representative for help in making server and operating system choices.

Is this a Development, Test or Production installation? When performing an installation there are certain aspects of the environment and configuration that must be taken into account during the install. Some examples are the ability to install multiple products onto a single server for a development environment. For the same set of products in a production environment there may be requirements for multiple servers with a separation of components. Examples are having the database on one server, HTB on another and user applications or Web Services on another. A sanity check should always be performed prior to any installation to assure that the proper configuration is being installed. Oracle recommends not to evaluate the instance or make changes once the installation is complete or even under way.
Is VPN access available and tested by customer's IT staff? Most often the installation and configuration of products are performed remotely. It is the customer's responsibility to assure that remote access is available for all of the tasks required. Testing of VPN access from within a customer's environment hide problems in IP and TCP communication some times. This remote access is also required for support and troubleshooting purposes. Note that for remote installations no work can be performed until remote access is available.
What is the hardware configuration? It is very important to check that the hardware is supported for the Oracle products being installed. Check if the platform is supported for Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.1 using the Oracle Certify page, available from the My Oracle Support Web site at https://metalink.oracle.com . This site indicates support by processor manufacturer, processor type (i.e. 32 bit vs. 64 bit) and Operating System. It is important to ensure adequate memory and CPU for the required performance. Sizing requirement support can be obtained by opening a Service Request (SR) through the My Oracle Support Web site. This also takes into account the number of servers. A test environment usually mimics a production environment but with a somewhat smaller amount of resources. Typically, you will have a minimum of two servers in a production install. One will be for the database server and the other for the HTB server. If you are deploying additional applications or plan on performing integration processes, you will need to consider additional servers for these tasks. If not additional servers then definitely additional CPUs, memory, and disks. Disk and memory are always the lacking factor and take time to correct. Consult the Installing Oracle Applications: A Guide to Using Rapid Install, Release R12 (12.1.1) for information on CPU, memory, and disk requirements. The document is available at:

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B53825_08/current/acrobat/121oaig.pdf.
What OS is required? In addition to checking that the OS is supported via the My Oracle Support Certify page, it is important to verify that you have the correct version of all software needed for the install. Certain operating systems may have additional kernel patch requirements. Consult the Oracle Applications Installation Update Notes, Release R12 (12.1.1) document for specific operating system details. The document is available from My Oracle Support Article ID: 761566.1.
Is the OS installed? This is typically the activity performed by the IT Staff of the Customer/Partner. Verify that the OS installed on each server is supported by the components being installed (for example, HTB, E-Business Suite 12.1.1, Application Server, and Database).
Do the servers have access to the Internet? This enables the installation team to download the required patches from My Oracle Support directly to the servers. This in turn ensures faster installations as time to copy large files or time to FTP those files from a third source can be avoided. When access for downloads it limited, direct access to the hardware may be required to install patches or stage software.
Is Oracle software staged? This can be done in advance, especially if you have already acquired HTB related media. Even in case of e-delivery, you can leverage customer/partner staff to ftp and stage the software, as it involves copy and FTP tasks.
How much disk space is available on each node? Checks should be made that sufficient disks exists for software, data, backup, and growth. If insufficient disk space is available, an issue must be raised and corrected prior to the installation. Sizing requirement support can be obtained by opening a Service Request (SR) through the My Oracle Support Web site.
Is this a single-node or multi-node install? It depends on hardware layout. Multiple node installations are typically longer as many patches have to be applied on all the nodes. Note that if HTB is the only Oracle application being installed there is no need to split the E-Business Suite application node across machines. The Concurrent Manager can be installed along with the rest of the applications tier. This greatly reduces the amount of patching required when performing a multi-node installation. There are several configurations possible. Because of the minimal load on the E-Business Suite apps tier, all of the E-Business Suite can reside on the database server. The apps tier can be copied or NFS mounted to the HTB server. For assistance in determining the proper layout of your installation, raise a Service Request (SR) through the My Oracle Support Web site.
Is Oracle E-Business Suite currently available? This question is valid in case of customers/partners who already use E-Business suite or those who have already installed the product from the CDs. This enables the installer to accurately apply required patches, which vary based on E-Business Suite version. Note that a current Oracle Applications customer may have versions of patches that differ from those mentioned in HTB documentation. Care must be taken in the evaluation of the patching and what impact they will have on HTB and the existing applications.
What database release is required? The E-Business Suite product is installed with a 11.1.0.7.0 version of the 11gR2 database. Check the latest certified RDBMS versions supported for Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.1 using the Oracle Certify Web Site, available from My Oracle Support Web site.
Is RAC required? Special considerations must be made if RAC is included in installation. If a RAC database is required a DBA familiar with installing E-Business Suite with a Real Application Clustered database should be consulted prior to upgrading the database to 11gR2. It will also be important to determine the number of database nodes that will be needed. For information on configuring HTB with RAC, consult the Using Oracle 10g Release 2 Real Application Clusters and Automatic Storage Management with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 on My Oracle Support Article ID: 388577.1
Is SSO required? Additional patches and configuration including Oracle Identity Management are required with a Single Sign On installation. You must decide whether only your application uses SSO or if the user will also be propagated to the HTB Repository. For information on the configuration of Single Sign-On with HTB, refer to Appendix E - Using Oracle Healthcare Transaction Base with SSO/JAAS Authentication, in Oracle Healthcare Transaction Base Programmer's Guide.
Are any additional languages required? If any additional languages are required there will be additional patch requirements. For each patch that is downloaded, you must check if a language patch is also available for that patch number. This will show up as language specific patches under the same number in My Oracle Support.
Is MLS is required? If Oracle Multiple Language Support is required, the additional language patches must be applied and the default language must be identified. The MLS configuration must be done as part of installation. For more information on configuring MLS, see ETS Multiple Language Support section of the Oracle Healthcare Transaction Base Programmer's Guide. Note that the Programmer's Guide is in HTML format and is downloaded along with the Oracle Healthcare Transaction Base Javadoc.
What version of HTB is being installed? An evaluation must be done if anything other than the most recent version of HTB is being installed. If an installation is being planned for the future and a newer version of HTB is available at the time of the installation, an analysis should be done to determine if the newer version of the product should be installed. Some problems may have already been fixed in the new release. Staying with the older release will result in lost time from patching or troubleshooting on the older version. Oracle recommends you to stay up with the most recent version.
Is this an initial HTB installation or an upgrade from a previous release? If you are upgrading from a major release of Oracle Applications E-Business Suite with HTB to the next major release of Oracle Applications E-Business Suite with HTB.
Will HTB be deployed on 10gAS mid-tier? Oracle recommends that a 10gAS mid-tier Enterprise edition installation be used over a stand-alone OC4J for deploying applications and instance management. The mid-tier is available as the 10gAS J2EE and Web Cache components. During the installation using the Oracle Universal Installer, you will select the J2EE and Web Cache component for installation. An entire 10g Application Server installation is not required for the deployment and management of HTB. If you are deploying your own applications you may need the full installation, but you must analyze this beforehand.

2.2 Additional Software and Product Components

Apart from the operating system and product version requirements for HTB, there may be additional components of products that need to be installed or evaluated for the implementation infrastructure. The following questions are intended to help you with these additional product requirements. Note that if additional products are required, you must also take into account any disk, memory, and CPU resources that they may consume.

Will HL7v3 messaging be required? It may entail the installation of other components such as B2B and BPEL. This document does not cover the B2B and BPEL components. It should be known that if the BPEL Process Manager is included in the implementation, it must reside on its own server for performance reasons.
Is HTB Gateway needed? If HL7v3 messaging is required it is possible that the sending system or interface engine will need an HL7 MLLP interface as opposed to being able to making direct calls to the HTB Java API layer. If required, HTB Gateway should be installed, configured, and tested with IMP. When sending a message through HTB Gateway, a Missing SenderConfig error is validation that HTB Gateway successfully connected to IMPService. HTB Gateway is delivered with HTB version 5.3. The additional resources needed for both disk and memory will need to be addressed, as this is a separate process that interfaces with the HTB. It can reside on the same or a separate server from HTB.
Are additional Oracle Integration products required? This question is specifically around a requirement for Oracle B2B and the Oracle BPEL processing engine. This document does not cover the B2B or BPEL components. It is only identifying a need for additional products. If BPEL and B2B are required, a full 10gAS install with the INFRA database will be needed. You need to analyze which version of 10gAS is required for each product. Installation of 10.1.3 currently requires a separate installation from HTB. If the 10.1.3 SOA Suite is being installed, Oracle recommends that the 10.1.3.5 version or higher be installed.