Scaling Out Oracle BI Instance (Clustering)

This post covers the steps required to scale out or add additional BI instances (second node) to an existing BI instance setup. With 12c scaling out process is changed where you can clone the first machine and then setup the second machine.

Scenario: You have Oracle BI instance setup on a Linux/Windows server and you would like to have another server with Oracle BI instance sharing the services. This post covers horizontal scale out assuming one node is added.

Following are the key steps:

1) Setup a shared directory
2) Preparing the Second Node (new OBIEE instance)
3) Scaling out using clone and unpack commands



1) Setup a Shared drive (SDD)

- Shared Directory need to be setup which should be accessible to both machines (existing machine and the new machine). Try to access this shared directory from both the machines.
- Create a folder as bidata under shared directory
- Mount this new Shared directory to both the machines (/BI_share/bidata)
- Stop all service on existing BI instance and copy everything from below path to the new folder (/BI_share/bidata)

<Domain_Home>/bidata

2) Preparing the Second Node

- Install Weblogic Server and Oracle Business Intelligence
- Make sure Oracle_Home folder is with same path in both machines (Oracle_Home path is setup during installation)
- Configure SSL on the new machine similar to that of existing machine if applicable

3) Scaling Out

- Stop all services (component,managed,Admin and Node manager) on existing machine and run the clone script from below path - clone_bi_machine

<Domain_Home>/bitools/bin/clone_bi_machine -m <new machine name> <name of new clone file (anyname)>

- Depending on the catalog size clone script runs for around 30 minutes
- Copy the new clone file that is created to the new machine after the process is complete
- On the new machine run the unpack command from below path and wait for it to complete

<Oracle_Home>/oracle_common/common/bin

./unpack.sh -domain=<path of domain on new machine> -nodemanager_type=PerDomainNodeManager

- Start services on both machine in below exact order (this is important)

Node manager on Node 2, Node Manager on Node 1, Admin Server, managed server on Node 1, component services on Node 1 and then managed server on Node 2

- Go to Console http://<server>:9500/console and check on under Environment > Servers if bi_server_2 is added

- Resynchronize the data on Node 2 machine by running below script

<Domain_Home>/bitools/bin/sync_midtier_db

-Start Component services of Node 2 in EM

That completes the clustering.

Cheers!