OBIEE 11.1.1.7 Pre-req Check Failure on OEL 5.11

Did I Just Hit a Bug

A client recently asked me to provision Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) 11.1.1.7 on Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) 5.11 in their pre-prod environment. Even though this was my first time provisioning OBIEE on this specific version of the OS, I was still very confident that it would be a fairly easy deployment since I had recently deployed the same version of OBIEE on RHEL.

Like any good IT professional, I made my way to the readme in order to perform a certification check.  Based on section 6.2 “Linux Operating System Requirements” of the Oracle Fusion Middleware System Requirement and Specifications sheet, everything is certified for me to proceed – OBIEE 11.1.17 is certified on OEL 5.  I installed the necessary OS patches/updates needed for OBIEE as listed on the Oracle FMW system requirements. 

So Why In The World Did My Install Fail For “Prerequisite Checks” ?

Uh oh, not as easy as I thought. Lets start troubleshooting:

• Check the certification matrix
• Ensure all required OS patches have been installed
• Read install error logs

Eureka! – The Logs Show That The Install Wizard Is Looking For OEL 6 Instead Of OEL 5.

OBIEE 11.1.1.7 uses <SOFTWARE_PATH>/bishiphome/Disk1/stage/prereq/linux64/refhost.xml when checking for the expected prerequisite values for OS Vendor, OS Type, OS Version, and recommended OS packages.  The original refhost.xml did not contain our OS version (Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.11) and therefore, when the install performed a pre-req check our environment always failed. 

Solution – Hack The xml File To Reflect A Supported OS.

There were 2 solutions available:

• Option A – upgrade/downgrade OS to a version of OEL listed in the refhost.xml
• Option B – modify refhost.xml to match our environment

Based on the level of effort, I recommend using option 2.  I modified the OS info in refhost.xml to be compatible with our environment, then selected the “Retry” option from the install wizard.  This resolved the issue.  See snippet below:

Old entries from refhost.xml

<OPERATING_SYSTEM>
<VERSION VALUE="5.6"/>
<ARCHITECTURE VALUE="x86_64"/>
<NAME VALUE="Linux"/>
<VENDOR VALUE="oracle"/> 

Updated entries from refhost.xml

<OPERATING_SYSTEM>
<VERSION VALUE="Oracle Linux Server release 5.11"/>
<ARCHITECTURE VALUE="x86_64"/>
<NAME VALUE="Linux"/>
<VENDOR VALUE="oracle"/> 

So Why Does The Certification Matrix Say OBIEE 11.1.1x Is Certified On OEL 5.x?

I am just confused why Oracle would say that OBIEE 11.1.1.7 is supported on all OEL 5.x releases. I guess I just hit a bug ?