Today I began my first of three Exalytics installations at a client. I am geeking out just working on the hardware.

Rather than having Oracle do the software installation, this client has opted for me to install EPM and OBIEE on these servers. The standard installation for EPM is Essbase only where this client is going to host the majority of their EPM stack (Planning and Essbase along with other requisite software) on the Exalytics servers and HFM/FDM/ODI/EPMA on Windows.

The Exalytics server isn’t that much different from any other 64-bit Linux server with the exception of the 1TB of RAM and 40 processing cores.  The OS is Oracle Linux release 5.5, which appears to be based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5.  The same downloads and installation steps for a regular 64-bit EPM install are used on Exalytics with very few exceptions.  I will follow up on the status with my thoughts as the project progresses.