Tuesday 8 October 2019

EPM 11.2 Essbase Issues

So 11.2 wasn't (and won't be) released in September. The news from Oracle OpenWorld 2019 and EPM Community Today is that it will now be released in October.

One of the nice tidbits that came out from those conferences is that EPM 11.2 will initially use Essbase 11.1.2.4, and will later use Essbase 19c. That sounds like good news, right?

Well maybe it will actually make things more complicated. See Essbase 11.1.2.4 is certified for Windows Server 2008 and 2012, SQL Server 2008 and 2012. RHEL 5 and 6 and Oracle Linux 5 and 6 are also supported. OracleDB 10, 11, 12.1 and 12.2 are supported.

Essbase 19c is slated for a June 2020 release. Essbase 19c will initially support OEL and Red Hat 7. Other operating systems will use a Docker based solution for support in the near term. No SQL Server support details has been published yet. OracleDB 12.1, 12.2 and 18c are supported.

EPM 11.2 will support Windows Server 2016 and 2019, SQL Server 2016 and 2017. It will initially release with no support for Linux, with RHEL and OEL 7 support to come after. OracleDB 12.2 will be supported.

So in order to be supported for EPM 11.2 and Essbase 11.1.2.4, your Essbase servers would need to be Windows Server 2012 and the rest of the environment would need to be Windows Server 2016. The same for SQL Server.

If you are a Linux shop you'd be able to use RHEL6 for the Essbase servers and RHEL7 for everything else. Luckily you can use OracleDB 12.2 for both EPM 11.2 and Essbase 11.1.2.4.

However if you want to upgrade to Essbase 19c then you would also need to upgrade the operating system to a supported version, either upgrading from Window Server 2012 to whatever version will be supported by Essbase 19c or from RHEL 6 to RHEL7.

These are hard decisions to be made by the infrastructure architect. You don't want to be out of support - but you also can't support a large upgrade a mere year after 11.2 is released.

Oracle OpenWorld 2019 presentations used for information: CON4713, PRO5411