Install > Preinstallation tasks > System requirements for installation > SA installer prerequisite checker

SA Installer prerequisite checker

SA now performs validation of a minimum baseline requirement for an SA Core installation. This validation is performed automatically by the SA Installer during an SA Core installation. You can also run this check as a standalone utility prior to installation to verify the suitability of a server as an SA Core host before attempting an installation.

Note: If the validation finds a requirement that is not met by your server, the installation stops and you must correct the problem before continuing the installation. If a recommended configuration is not met, you will see a warning, but can continue with the installation.

The prerequisites that are validated during the check include:

  • Host Physical Characteristics
    • Physical memory
    • Number of CPUs (cores or physical)
    • IDE disk drive optimizations
  • Oracle Database - disk space, parameter, tablespace requirements (existing Oracle installations only)
    • Supported Oracle version is installed
    • Required Oracle patches are installed
    • Supported operating system configuration
    • Swap space size
    • Temp space
    • User oracle defined
    • The port specified by the db.port parameter on remote database hosts is being monitored and accepts connections.
  • Required Packages - packages that must be installed.

    During installation, the SA Installer performs a prerequisite check that includes checking for recommended package version levels. You may see warnings during the check if your installation has earlier versions of these packages. HPE recommends that you upgrade any packages flagged with a warning in order to ensure SA’s full functionality.

    You can continue the SA installation with the earlier packages but may sacrifice the functionality provided by the newer version.

  • Recommended Packages - packages that should be installed
  • Unsupported Packages - packages that must not be installed
  • Reserved Ports - ports that must be open and available
  • Disk Space Requirements - checks that minimum disk space required for installation available (fresh install only)
  • Operating System Configuration:
    • Hostname is resolvable
    • File system (links maintained, case sensitive)
    • Ability to create new users and groups
    • Allocated swap space
    • Timezone setting (UTC - sets hwclock to match the system clock on Linux systems) and locale (en_US.UTF-8 or equivalent)
    • NFS versions
    • No VxFS (SLES only)
    • Sufficient temp space is available
    • Translations for localhost are available
    • Verification that no critical file paths contain symbolic links
Note: The prerequisite check requires root privileges and validates both required and recommended items. Required items, such as required packages and Oracle settings, must be corrected if the validation fails, however, if you have business requirements that override recommendations, such as number of CPUs, you can still perform an SA Core installation.

Prerequisite validation of non-SA-supplied Oracle installations

If you intend to use an existing Oracle installation rather than the SA-supplied Oracle database, that database must meet the requirements described in Oracle setup for the Model Repository. When you begin an SA Core installation and an existing database installation, the prerequisite checker will validate the Oracle requirements as well as the core server requirements.

SA Core server validation

After you have initiated an SA Core installation, the installer performs the prerequisite check before installation of the Oracle database and before installation of the SA Core Components. The validation progress is displayed on screen showing the items being validated and the results of the validation. The display during validation will be similar to this:

Processing on Linux/4AS-X86_64 using
/tmp/OPSWprereqs-40.0.0.0.54/Linux_oracle_rqmts.conf
Checking 'required' packages for Linux/4AS-X86_64
Checking 'required' patches for LINUX/4AS-X86_64
Checking 'recommended' packages for LINUX/4AS-X86_64
Checking 'absent' packages for LINUX/4AS-X86_64
Testing memory size
Testing for number of CPUs
Testing hostname for FQDN
Testing swap space allocated
Verify timezone is UTC
[...]

If the validation indicates that your system does not meet the recommended configuration, you can either stop the installation, take measures to meet the recommendations, and restart the installation or you can choose to continue the installation without changes.

Prerequisites

The SA Prerequisite Check requires the /bin/sh Unix shell. If /bin/sh is not available, the prerequisite check will not run.

Manual prerequisite check

You can run the SA Prerequisite Check manually using the instructions in this section. When run manually before the Oracle RDBMS is installed, the following is validated:

  • CPU requirements
  • Disk space requirements

When the SA Prerequisite Check is run manually after Oracle RDBMS installation but before SA Core Component installation, the following is validated:

  • When the Oracle RDBMS is installed locally, the required RDBMS version and patches.
Note: If the Oracle database is installed remotely, prerequisite testing will extract database access information from the Core Definition File (CDF) of the current core install. If the database is accessible, it will be tested in a remote mode using Oracle's Translation Name Service (TNS). Accessibility depends on the availability of SQL*Plus which is installed as part of the database or as Oracle's InstantClient.

You invoke the prerequisite check from the command line on the server on which you plan to host the SA Core.

Locate the file:

<distro>/opsware_installer/OPSWprereqs-<version>.zip

where <distro> is the full path to the Product Software (primary)media. Unzipping this file will create a sub-directory, OPSWprereqs-<version> which contains the script preinstall_requisites.sh.

Usage

.../preinstall_requisites.sh <phase> [--upgrade] [--cdf_file=<path>] [--resp_file=<path>] [--verbose | --silent]

where:

Prerequisite check script arguments

Argument

Description

<phase>

Specifies an Oracle database validation or SA Core host validation

Valid Values: Oracle, core_inst, or satellite

--upgrade

Specifies an upgrade and suppresses the disk space checks. If not specified, fresh install is assumed and disk space checks are run assuming that no SA components are currently installed.

--cdf_file=<path>

Specifies the path to a valid CDF for the current installation. When specified, certain values that might be specified during the install process are taken from the CDF, such as Oracle installation values.

--verbose | --debug | --silent

verbose or -- debug display additional output, silent displays no output.
Note: You must have root privileges to run the script. There is a test to see if the logged in user can create users and groups. Therefore, the user running the SA Prerequisite Check must be capable of creating users and groups, but the current user must be the same user that will be running the installer.

Interpreting prerequisite checker results

When the prerequisite check completes, you see messages similar to the following.

Prerequisite Checks
===================

Results for <IP_address>:

 

       FAILURE Insufficient swap space (18 GBytes).
                24 Gbytes is the recommended for Oracle.

        WARNING File system ‘/’ has 29447 MBytes available and 154050 is
                recommended.

        [INFO] Processing on Linux/6Server-X86_64 using /var/tmp/hpsa_media/               opsware_installer/prereq/Linux_oracle_rqmts.conf

        FAILURE These packages are required but not installed.

                If a version is specified, that version or higher is required.

                PACKAGE ARCH VERSION

                libaio-devel x86_64 0.3.107-10.el6

 

Enter the option number or one of the following directives:
(<c>ontinue, <p>revious, <h>elp, <q>uit)

The SA Prerequisite Check identifies WARNINGs and/or FAILUREs. FAILUREs can cause a failed or incomplete installation and must be resolved before continuing the installation. WARNINGs allow you to continue the installation, however, core performance may be negatively affected if you continue without resolving them.

If your server passes the prerequisite check, you can continue the installation.

Additional Linux requirements

For Linux systems, you must adhere to the following requirements:

  • You must specify the server’s initial run level as level 3 in the /etc/inittab file.
  • For RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 you need to upgrade iproute package to version greater than 2.6.32-10.

  • If the server uses Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) hard disks, you must enable Direct Memory Access (DMA) and some other advanced hard disk features that improve performance by running the following script as a user with root privileges on the server and then reboot the server:

    # cat > /etc/sysconfig/harddisks << EOF
    USE_DMA=1
    MULTIPLE_IO=16
    EIDE_32BIT=3
    LOOKAHEAD=1
    EOF

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