Planning RMI is Broken...Again
It has come to my attention that Planning RMI service is potentially broken again in patches after 11.2.9. I have confirmed this in 11.2.10 and 11.2.11, and while for many customers you might not even notice it, it can certainly be an issue for customers still using the RMI for things like ODI integration calls.
The versions of EPM 11.2.x have long had an issue with the Planning RMI Service, because Oracle installs the product with the service pointing to the wrong JVM.dll. The end result is the service starts fine, and everything appears to be working, but it never fully starts and binds to its port of 11333.
Oracle has a KB article on this already: Hyperion Planning: In 11.2 Environment Encounter the RMI Error: "java.rmi.ConnectException: Connection refused to host: nested exception is: java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect" (Doc ID 2662672.1)
This document directs you to update the registry for the RMI service, and set the path for the JVM.dll to \Oracle\Middleware\dbclient32\jdk\jre\bin\client\jvm.dll.
Once this was done in earlier 11.2.x version, when restarting the service, you would now see it bind (via netstat) to 11333. However, in these newer versions, the product fails to start completely. A look in the Application Event Viewer logs for Windows will show that there is a problem loading the Virtual Machine:
I tinkered around for a bit and couldn’t figure out exactly which file or files have changed to make this service completely non-functional again. So, I went back to another lab server (running EPM 11.2.9) and copied in the entire \Oracle\Middleware\dbclient32\jdk directory as a test.
Upon completion of the copy, I restarted Planning’s RMI service, and it both started successfully and bound to the 11333 port as expected.
So, I’d recommend adding the folder \Oracle\Middleware\dbclient32\jdk to the list of directories you backup prior to applying either EPM 11.2.10 or 11.2.11, to ensure that the RMI service works as expected. Once the update is complete, you can restore this folder for a fully functioning Planning RMI service.
As always, thank you for reading and please feel to reach out to myself or the iArch Solutions team if you need any assistance with EPM or Cloud Services.