About Middleware Home, EPM Oracle Home, and EPM Oracle Instance

Middleware Home

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.

EPM Oracle Home

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 Oracle Enterprise Performance Management 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.

EPM Oracle Instance

An EPM Oracle instance contains one or more system components such as Oracle HTTP Server, Oracle Essbase Server, as well as one or more Java web applications in one or more domains. The directory structure of an Oracle instance is separate from the directory structure of the Oracle home. It can reside anywhere; it need not be within the Middleware home directory.

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.

Java 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 EPM Oracle instance. If you are installing in a distributed environment, create a new EPM Oracle instance on each machine.