Installing Informatica PowerCenter 8.6.1 Server on Red Hat / Centos (including VMWare)

What a great thing VMWare is.  If you aren’t using it yet, you are missing out!

This blog will explain how to get an evaluation / developer version of Informatica Powercenter 8.6.1 along with how to install and configure the software under Red Hat Enterprise 5.3 Community Edition (aka Centos).

Downloading Informatica PowerCenter

Unfortunately Informatica has not seen the light with respect to allowing developers or consultants to have access to a trial or evaluation version of PowerCenter.  In my opinion this really hurts their market growth by limiting the number of people that are championing their product.  Fortunately, Oracle Corporation  gets it and has been providing evaluation software for free for many years.  How does this help?  Well, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition includes Informatica PowerCenter!

To download Informatica, go to http://edelivery.oracle.com. Once you get through the license agreement and export restrictions, choose "Oracle Business Intelligence" in the Product Pack drop down box, and then choose "Linux x86" in the Platform drop down box. Select "Oracle Business Intelligence (10.1.3) Media Pack for Linux x86" and click continue. Download "Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.4.1 for Linux x86 (Red Hat / Oracle Enterprise)" - part #V16379-01.

Pre-Work

First you need to have an Oracle database repository for Informatica Server to use. If you need to create one, see my post on how to install Oracle 11g on Linux.

Next you need to create a user for the Informatica repository. If you want the repository stored someplace other than the 'users' tablespace, then you will need to modify the create user statement below.

sqlplus / as sysdba

SQL> create user inf identified by inf default tablespace users temporary tablespace temp quota unlimited on users;

SQL> grant connect, resource to inf;

su -

useradd inf
passwd inf
mkdir /opt/informatica
chown inf:inf /opt/informatica
chmod 755 /opt/informatica

Installing

Logon to Centos as the Informatica user you created above (inf) and then navigate into the downloaded and unzipped software directory and find the program "install.sh" and choose GUI install. In my case I accepted the default language of en_US.UTF-8 which worked fine. When you get to the license key prompt, navigate into the Informatica install directory and locate the file "Oracle_All_OS_Prod.key" and click next.

On the install location screen, change the home directory installation directory to /opt/informatica/PowerCenter 8.6.0

Accept remaining defaults

Choose to create a new domain

On the Configure Database window:

Database Type	Oracle
Database URL	localhost:1521
Service Name	orcl.localdomain

On the Configure Domain window, you can use any names or values you want for your Informatica domain.  Just make sure you write down the values as you will need them later.  This is where you want to use your actual host name and not “localhost” or else you will have problems down the line.

Domain Name	domain01
Host Name	centos
Node Name	node01
Domain Port Number	6001
Domain User Name	admin

Voila!  After the installer completes your Informatica PowerCenter 8.6.1 server will be up and running.  Simply navigate to http://centos:8443 and logon with the admin username and password.