OPPM 9.1 And Windows Server 2012 R2 Deployed In One Day

Oracle Primavera Portfolio Management is the leading portfolio management software solution on the market, so for us, it was a logical step to include it in Emerald’s Cloud Infrastructure.

Being in charge of the deployment of OPPM, I have to say, it was quite a straightforward process but I did face a few issues during the installation.

Database Installation

Our Window Server 2012 R2 virtual machine was brand new, so I proceeded to deploy Microsoft SQL Server Express 2012. This happened to be as easy as expected, once the installer downloaded, a few setup screens later and we had our instance up and running.

Web server

Windows Server conveniently comes with IIS 8.5. All I had to do was create a new blank website, generate a local SSL certificate and assign it to a new *:443 binding. This website was ready to host the OPPM applications.

OPPM 9.1

Installing OPPM itself was also easy. The installer is intuitive and didn't pose any problems. It was after I got it deployed successfully to the IIS website that some trouble started.

Reaching the http://host:443/ProSight url would return an explicit, yet confusing error:

After some research, I realized it might be due to a missing module handler in IIS, namely the ASP.Net handler, but after checking, I noticed it was there! 64 and 32bit versions of the ASP.Net Framework 4.0 were installed and enabled... What could be the problem?

I knew for a fact that the requested file was a .aspx file because the /ProSight URI was actually redirecting to a default.aspx page. So why wouldn't IIS handle the file correctly? Could it be a certificate issue? The answer was no, the :8080 url would give the same result.

So I spent a bit more time searching for a solution.

Later on, I figured out it was because the v4 .Net Framework was incompatible with OPPM 9.1, at least in my environment. To fix that, I had to go through a few additional configuration steps.

Install and enable the v3.5 .Net framework

So to install and enable the v3.5 .Net framework took a matter of minutes. Windows 2012 provides a feature on/off management panel where I found the ASP.Net v3.5 component. Once installed, running 'aspnet_regiis -i' from the C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727 folder was enough to expose it to IIS.

Note that the 3.5 version of the framework runs on top of the v2.0 CLR, which is why the command has to run from the v2.0.50727 folder instead of the v3.5.

Configure IIS to use the framework

In IIS, each application is associated to an Application Pool, which is where the .Net Framework information has to be changed. Once set to use the v2.0 of ASP.Net, OPPM loaded perfectly.