ECE Preinstallation Tasks

4 ECE Preinstallation Tasks

Learn about the preinstallation tasks for Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) Elastic Charging Engine (ECE).

Topics in this document:

Note:

(Linux) The ece_provision script is not supported in ECE 12.0 and later releases. You must manually apply the Oracle Linux network configuration changes on your environment to prepare machines in your topology for a distributed ECE installation.

Preinstallation Tasks Common to All ECE Installations

You must perform these preinstallation tasks for all ECE installation types:

Install Apache Groovy on the driver machine and set it in your PATH environment variable.

Groovy is used for launching the Elastic Charging Controller (ECC), which is the ECE command line interface. ECC is an extension of the Groovy Shell (groovysh) for ECE. For information on how to install Groovy, see "Install Groovy" on the Apache Groovy website.
Install Oracle Java Development Kit (JDK) and set it in your PATH environment variable.

The JRE is required for the installer process. See the Oracle JDK documentation for information about installing JDK.
Install Oracle Coherence and set the path to the Coherence libraries in your PATH environment variable.

The Coherence libraries are required to install ECE. For information about installing Oracle Coherence, see "Installing Oracle Coherence for Java" in Oracle Fusion Middleware Installing Oracle Coherence.
Obtain the required JAR files and save them to a directory on the driver machine.

Make a record of the location of the JAR files, because you are required to specify this location during the ECE installation process. For the list of required JAR files, see "Additional ECE Software Requirements" in BRM Compatibility Matrix.
Create an ECE user account. See "Creating the ECE User Account".
Establish two-way password-less SSH logins. See "Establishing Two-Way Password-less SSH Logins".

Creating the ECE User Account

Create the user account that is to be the primary user running ECE in your environment. The ECE user is a Linux account used for password-less SSH.

You create the same user account on the driver machine (the primary administrator machine) and all machines that are running ECE.

Make a record of the user name. You will be required to specify the user name during the ECE installation process.

To create the user account:

Log in to the driver machine.
Enter the following commands:
```
useradd user_name
passwd user_name
```
where user_name is the name of the user.
When prompted, enter the password for the user.

See the discussion in your Linux documentation for more information about the useradd command.

Establishing Two-Way Password-less SSH Logins

Establish two-way password-less SSH logins between all the physical servers in your cluster: between the driver machine and each server machine and between all server machines.

If you will install an ECE standalone system on one machine only, a password-less SSH login is also required for the ECE user on the standalone machine.

To establish two-way password-less SSH logins, perform the following steps on each machine:

Log in to the ECE machine as the ECE user.
Run the following commands:
```
ssh-keygen -t dsa
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub user@host
```
where:
- user is the name of the ECE user.
- host is the name of the server for which the password-less SSH is being established.
  
  If you will install an ECE standalone system on one machine, host in the ssh-copy-id command must be localhost.

The number of ECE nodes you can start simultaneously is affected by the limitation on how many simultaneous SSH connections the machines in your environment can make from or to another machine. The start command, by default, attempts to start ten nodes simultaneously using ten different threads. Ensure that your maximum number of open sessions permitted per network connection is less than the number of nodes you want to start simultaneously from the driver machine.

Preinstallation Tasks for an ECE Integrated Installation

Perform these preinstallation tasks before you install an integrated ECE system:

Ensure that you have performed all preinstallation tasks common to all ECE installations. See "Preinstallation Tasks Common to All ECE Installations".
Install an Oracle database. See "Installing and Configuring Oracle Database".
Install an Oracle NoSQL database. See "Installing and Configuring Oracle NoSQL Database".
Install BRM. See "Installing and Configuring BRM".
Set up the Oracle Advanced Queuing (AQ) database queues (DBMS AQs). See "Setting Up Database Queues for ECE-to-BRM Mediation".
Install Pricing Design Center (PDC). See "Installing and Configuring Pricing Design Center".
Install the SCTP package if you will use Diameter Gateway for network integration. See "(Diameter Gateway) Installing SCTP Package".

Installing and Configuring Oracle Database

Note:

If you want to persist all the ECE data, you must use Oracle Database. You can use the BRM database to persist the ECE data. However, you can also create a new database if required.
If you want to persist only rated events, you can use Oracle NoSQL Database. See "Installing and Configuring Oracle NoSQL Database" for more information.

Oracle recommends that the installation and configuration of Oracle Database be performed by an experienced database administrator. To install and configure Oracle Database, see the Oracle Database installation documentation.

When you install the software, do the following:

Install Oracle Database Enterprise Edition.
Create the ECE database.
(Optional) Install Oracle Partitioning. You need this to partition the tables in your ECE database.
(Optional) Create ECE tablespaces and temporary tablespaces for the ECE schema, to store the ECE data.

Oracle recommends that you create separate ECE tablespaces and temporary tablespaces for each schema. However, you can use a single ECE tablespace and temporary tablespace to create all the schemas.

Using an Existing Schema User

You can use an existing schema for ECE persistence or create a new schema user during the ECE installation. If you are using existing schema user, the user must have granted select on v$database.

To grant select permission, log in to your database as user sysdba and run the following SQL grant select command:

SQL> grant select on v_$database to db_user

Installing and Configuring Oracle NoSQL Database

ECE publishes rated events to a data store in Oracle NoSQL Database where the events are stored temporarily before being extracted and sent to the BRM system.

Note:

ECE uses Oracle NoSQL Database only to temporarily store rated event information.

To store all the ECE data including the rated event information in the database, you must use Oracle Database.

When you install Oracle NoSQL Database, note the database connection information (such as host name, port number, and data store name). You must specify this information during the ECE installation process.

When configuring NoSQL Database, set up the NoSQL data store to which ECE can publish rated events. Size the Oracle NoSQL database key-value data store installation to match your ECE charging server topology.

After you install an Oracle NoSQL database, you can start the Oracle NoSQL database data store with either a single-node or multiple-node configuration:

A single-node data store configuration is included with the Oracle NoSQL database installation and can be started in a nonproduction ECE environment.
A multiple-node NoSQL data store configuration is required for running ECE in a production environment and requires additional configuration to make multiple nodes work as an Oracle NoSQL database cluster.

See the discussion in the Oracle NoSQL Database documentation for information about installing NoSQL Database, setting up a NoSQL data store, and setting up high availability and performance for the Oracle NoSQL Database.

ECE uses the Oracle NoSQL database client library for connecting and interacting with the Oracle NoSQL database. The Oracle NoSQL database client library is installed when you install the ECE server software. You provide the Oracle NoSQL database connection information when you install ECE.

About Oracle NoSQL Data Store Partitions

An Oracle NoSQL data store is divided into partitions. Partitions store the rated events processed by each Rated Event Formatter instance and are associated with the target BRM database schema to which the rated events are to be exported. The partitions are automatically created for each BRM database schema.

Tip:

One BRM schema is not mapped to one Oracle NoSQL database partition. The Oracle NoSQL database can have any preconfigured number of partitions based on the data size. The Rated Event Formatter partition configuration entry actually refers to the BRM database schema, not the Oracle NoSQL partition.

Installing and Configuring BRM

Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) is required in the charging system to perform billing, subscription management, and financial management.

Make a record of the BRM connection information (such as host names, port numbers, and passwords) when you install BRM. You will be required to specify this information during the ECE installation process.

See "Installing BRM" in BRM Installation Guide for more information.

Setting Up Database Queues for ECE-to-BRM Mediation

When configuring BRM, set up the following Oracle Advanced Queuing (AQ) database queues (DBMS AQs):

A database queue to which the BRM Account Synchronization DM can publish business events for ECE to consume.
A database queue to which ECE can move failed update requests from BRM (referred to as the Suspense Queue).
A database queue to which ECE can publish acknowledgment events for BRM to consume (used when processing rating requests from BRM, such as during rerating).

See "Creating WebLogic JMS Queues for BRM" for details about the information you will need.

Installing and Configuring Pricing Design Center

Pricing Design Center (PDC) is required for creating the pricing data (pricing components and setup components) that is used by ECE for rating usage requests.

During the PDC installation process, when prompted to specify whether you want to integrate ECE with PDC, select Yes. PDC will create a JMS queue (a work item queue) where it will publish pricing data. The ECE Pricing Updater will listen on this queue for pricing updates so that it can load the data into ECE.

If you have already installed PDC but did not specify to integrate it with ECE, manually set up a JMS queue on a PDC WebLogic server and configure PDC to publish pricing data to this queue.

Make a record of the connection information (such as host name, port number, and password) for the WebLogic server where the JMS queue resides. You will be required to specify this information during the ECE installation process.

Note:

During ECE installation, the ECE installer checks the connection to your WebLogic Server through TCP Port 7. Ensure that TCP Port 7 is open in your WebLogic server's firewall.

For information about installing and configuring PDC, see "Installing Pricing Design Center" in PDC Installation Guide.

(Diameter Gateway) Installing SCTP Package

If you plan to use Diameter Gateway for network integration for online charging, and you plan to use Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), verify that your operating system has SCTP support. If your operating system does not have SCTP, you must install the SCTP system package for your operating system version.

Preinstallation Tasks for ECE Software Upgrade

Note:

If you have an existing ECE installation, note the following:

A direct upgrade from an existing ECE release is not supported.
ECE supports complete installation only. To upgrade ECE, you install the new version of ECE using the Complete option and reconfigure the configuration and mediation files to match your existing release.

If you have an existing ECE installation, perform these preinstallation tasks before upgrading ECE:

Make a complete offline backup of your existing ECE configuration (the ECE installation directory and its content: ECE_home). In particular, make sure you back up all customized files. Store this backup in a safe location. The data in these files are necessary if you encounter any issues during the installation process.
Create a home directory for the new version of ECE. Because your old release is on the same driver machine, be careful to specify the home details for the new version of ECE when you run the ECE Installer.

The home details consist of the home directory path and a unique name you give to the new installation. When you run the installer, it displays the home details of any old release installations it detects on your driver machine in the Specify Home Details list.
To enable persistence of all the ECE data in the database, use Oracle Database. See "Installing and Configuring Oracle Database" for more information.
If you have an existing installation of ECE integrated with BRM and Pricing Design Center (PDC), do the following:
1. Install the compatible version of BRM on the machine on which BRM is installed. See "Installing BRM" in BRM Installation Guide.
2. Install the compatible version of PDC on the machine on which PDC is installed. See "Installing Pricing Design Center" in PDC Installation Guide.
Install the recommended version of the other required software on the machine on which ECE is installed. See "Software Requirements" for more information.
Install Oracle Coherence and set the path to the Coherence libraries in your PATH environment variable.

The Coherence libraries are required to install ECE. For information about installing Oracle Coherence, see "Installing Oracle Coherence for Java" in Oracle Fusion Middleware Installing Oracle Coherence.
(Optional) Install the recommended version of Oracle NoSQL Database as applicable. See "Installing and Configuring Oracle NoSQL Database" for more information.
Obtain the required JAR files and save them to a directory on the driver machine.

Note the location of the JAR files, because you are required to specify this location during the ECE installation process. For the list of required JAR files, see "Additional ECE Software Requirements" in BRM Compatibility Matrix.