Installing and Configuring IBM Information Server 8.5

After a few attempts trying to install on a VM (VMWare Workstation 6.5), I gave up and decided to set up on a physical machine. There were a couple problems with VM:

1. It recommended a maximum of 2.8G for the guest machine
2. The VM kept hanging when I tried to install Windows 2003 Enterprise

Anyway after reading the manual, I found out that DS8.5 requires a minimum of 4G of ram for each tier. There are four tiers - client, services, engine and metadata repository. If you intend to put more than one tier on a host, you will require a minimum of 6G. Since this is a development/sandpit box, I've decided to put all tiers on one host and the following is what I ended up with.

• Intel Quad-core
• 8G RAM
• Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition (Standard Edition can only address up to 4G)

Having installed the base system, I then added the following in preparation for IIS installation:

• Get latest Windows 2003 updates (Service Pack 2)
• Install a copy of Acrobat Reader
• Install a copy of Internet Explorer 7
• Install WIC (Windows imaging component is required by IIS)
• Install Oracle 10gR2
• Create a single Oracle database with UTF8 and UTF16 character encoding
• Install Oracle SQL Developer
• Run scripts to create XMeta and IA objects (these can be found under DatabaseSupport in the IIS installation pack)

The actuall installation process is all web-based. Setup.exe starts up a web server in a command window. It then starts up a web browser and connects to that server. The installation process goes through quite a few validation checks before finally starting the install but once all the validation checks passed, I could leave it alone to do it's thing which was a good thing because the install process took something like 6 hours to complete.
The first thing I noticed after installation was that there were quite a few new icons on my desktop some of which were familiar others not so.

• Administrator Client
• Designer Client
• IBM Import Export Manager
• IBM InfoSphere FastTrack Client
• IBM InfoSphere Information Server Command Line Interface
• IBM InfoSphere Information Server Console
• IBM InfoSphere Information Server Documentation
• IBM InfoSphere Information Server Manager
• Multi-Client Manager
• Start ASB Agent
• Stop ASB Agent
• Web Console for IBM Information Server

Before I could use the DataStage clients, users and groups had to be created on the Engine host with the correct privileges. After installation, there is only one IIS user - wasadmin. This user needs to be mapped to an Administrator user on the operating system.
Create OS users and groups

1. Login to the Engine host as administrator
2. Create a new group (e.g. DataStage Developers)
3. Create a new user (e.g. etluser)
4. Add new user to new group
5. Grant write permissions to new group on IIS server directory and all subdirectories (c:\IBM\InformationServer\Server)

Create/configure IIS users

1. Login to the web console ("Web Console for IBM InfoSphere Information Server") as wasadmin
2. Navigate to Administration/Domain Management/Engine Credentials
3. Select the server engine then click on "Open My Credentials"
4. Enter the name and password of an Administrator user on the Engine host then click on "Save and Close"
5. Navigate to Administration/Users and Groups/New User
6. Add a new DataStage user (e.g. jim) by entering the required fields
7. Click on "Suite Component" and select "DataStage and QualityStage User"
8. Click on "Save and Close"

Grant roles to the new user

1. Open Administrator Client
2. Navigate to Projects and select a project (e.g. dstage1)
3. Select Permissions
   Note that wasadmin is shown with the role of "DataStage and QualityStage Administrator" but the new user is not shown.
4. Click on "Add User or Group"
5. Change the role to "DataStage and QualityStage Developer"
6. Click on "OK" and "Close"

At this point the new user (jim) was able to create/manage new jobs with DataStage Designer and DataStage Director.