Using OBIEE SampleApp 305 in VM Fusion

This post originally appeared on the Rittman Mead blog.

Oracle distribute the new OBIEE SampleApp as a VirtualBox image, but it is dead easy to run it on VM Fusion instead. Here’s how:

Unzip the SampleApp archive files, and import the OVF to VM
Add and amend network adaptors if required. I always use three:
- a host-only network private to my Mac and any other VMs running
- NAT
- Bridged
The first means I can always work with the VM from my Mac (SSH, web, etc) regardless of external network changes. The second two, NAT and Bridged, cover internet access out from the VM (software updates, etc) for 95% of situations.
Boot up. Expect to get X server error (because VMWare has a different video driver to VirtualBox). Keep selecting No, until you get to the console
Login as root/root
Remove the VirtualBox additions services:
List the VirtualBox additions services
```
chkconfig --list|grep vbox
```

Disable VirtualBox additions, as root:

chkconfig --list|grep vbox|awk '{print $1}'|xargs -I'{}' chkconfig --del {}

Confirm they’ve been removed:
```
chkconfig --list|grep vbox
```
+ image::/images/2013/06/06695sa_04.png[]
Install VM Tools
Select “Update VMWare Tools” from VM Fusion menu

Mount the CD image on the guest

mkdir /media/cdrom
mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

Copy the installer to the guest

cp /media/cdrom/VMwareTools*.tar.gz /tmp

Unpack the installer
```
cd /tmp
tar xf VMwareTools*.tar.gz
```
Run the installer. Go with all the defaults given.
```
cd vmware-tools-distrib/
./vmware-install.pl
```
Reboot the VM.
```
reboot
```
On reboot, the VM should startup to the graphical (GNOME) Desktop

Pimp my server 🔗

This is all optional, but steps I run on a new server instance to get it how I like it:

Open a terminal window and run setup
```
sudo setup
```
From here you can amend setting for things such as the keyboard layout, timezone, and networking. You can also use the desktop GUI tools to do this if you prefer
Add your public SSH key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys to enable connecting over SSH without entering a password each time

Create ~/.screenrc (screen is already installed on SampleApp. See this post for details of what screen is and why it is so useful).

hardstatus alwayslastline "%{= RY}%H %{kG}%{G} Screen(s): %{c}%w %=%{kG}%c  %D, %M %d %Y  LD:%l"
startup_message off
msgwait 1
defscrollback 100000
nethack on

Add EPEL yum repository:

wget http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -i epel*.rpm

Update all packages
```
sudo yum update -y
```
Set the OBIEE and DB instances to start automagically at bootup, using init.d script such as these

This post originally appeared on the Rittman Mead blog.