This time around, installing Pentaho BI Server version 3.8.0 Community Edition, I started with a Dell PowerEdge R715. 64 GB of RAM, 24 CPU cores at 2.5 GHz and a boatload of RAIDed disk space. For the OS, I installed Debian server 6.0 (squeeze). MySQL is still our standard for RDBMS so I installed version 5.1.49-3-log from the Debian packages. I configured it with InnoDB and MyISAM and located the datadir on the RAID device.

We experimented a bit before installing any software, to confirm that we were using an appropriate filesystem type, with appropriate parameter values. We didn’t find a huge performance difference between ext3, ext4 and xfs, ext4 performed slightly better, in what we thought were “typical” usage scenarios so we chose that filesystem. We also set the option string “nosuid,nodev,noatime,data=writeback,nobh,barrier=0,nouser_xattr”.

I will try OpenJDK 1.6.0_18 from the Debian packages and start with its default configuration. I will not be surprised if I run into some issues which can only be solved by replacing it the the “official” JDK build from java.com.

Admin server configuration

To configure the Admin Server first, I adjusted three files:

resource/config/console.xml:

I defined the solution-path, war-path and platform-username to fit my environment. I added default-roles and adjusted the default-server-dir to match my installation.

resource/config/log4j.xml:

I adjusted the File parameter and set all of the logging levels to DEBUG.

resource/config/login.properties:

I changed the password for the admin user. I also switched from an OBF password to an MD5 password.

resource/config/console.properties:

Enabled SSL.

BI server configuration

To enable the use of LDAP for user authentication, I adjusted three files:

pentaho-solutions/system/applicationContext-spring-security-ldap.xml

pentaho-solutions/system/applicationContext-security-ldap.properties

pentaho-solutions/system/pentaho-spring-beans.xml