Why is my 11.2.8 Maintenance Release Hanging?
If you have applied the various generations of the Oracle EPM upgrades to the 11.2.x stack, you are probably familiar with the process. To briefly recap, you download the latest version and run the installer. This will detect what products are already installed and allow you to install an ‘Update’.
This is all well and good, and prior to EPM 11.2.8 I never encountered an issue. However, during a recent upgrade, when I was on the last server in the stack, the installer just seemed to hang. Now the last step in the upgrade process is creating the Oracle Inventory, which can take a while. The installer itself comes with the warning ‘this may take several minutes’. So, I’m used to waiting 15 minutes on some servers for this last step.
But, the server I was running this on only had Essbase on it. As usual, I waited, and waited…and waited. Nothing. I looked in the Task Manager on Windows to get a feel for what was happening and there was no activity, just a Java process sitting there doing nothing. No movement in memory, no movement in CPU, just a seemingly orphaned process asking me to wait. So I waited for about 1 hour and then lost patience.
I was thinking ‘do I need to restore these servers and roll the whole upgrade back’? Before pulling out contingency plans, I decided to check Oracle Support’s Knowledge Base and low and behold, there is a Document ID about this very issue: EPM: 11.2.8 Installer Hangs at 80% "creating Oracle Inventory" (Doc ID 2853657.1)
Essentially, this is a bug with the upgrade installer. See Essbase while needing the binaries for WebLogic Server, does not actually create a WebLogic Domain. There are no Java Application Server components to deploy. Yet it seems that our upgrade utility when creating the Oracle Inventory is expecting one. The end result is a loop where it looks for a domains folder and does not find one.
As noted in the document, you can manually create the domain folder structure up-front before running the utility, or if you’re like me, you can find out after-the-fact and re-run the installer and select the ‘ReInstall This Release’ option.
As always, thanks for reading and if you should have any questions or need assistance with anything EPM or Cloud Architecture related, contact us at iArch Solutions. We look forward to hearing from you.