Prepare to Install › Installation Overview › Set up Server Communication › Windows

Windows

BusinessObjects Enterprise requires that you install and configure a database server and web application server software if you want to use an existing database or web application server. You can also install a database server and a Web application server during your installation of BusinessObjects Enterprise.

Note the following items about setting up server communication on Windows:

• Each BusinessObjects Enterprise computer must be able to communicate over TCP/IP with the computer that runs your CMS.
• If the host computer has more than one network interface card (NIC), the CMS can automatically bind to a primary NIC. If the primary NIC is not routable, you may have to configure your servers after installation. Alternatively, you could make the primary NIC routable before installing BusinessObjects Enterprise. For more information about how to reconfigure to bind to routable NICs see the Managing and Configuring Servers chapter in the BusinessObjects Enterprise Administrator’s Guide.
• Servers that run BusinessObjects Enterprise must have a fixed hostname. Administrative privileges are required to set a fixed hostname. You can use fully qualified domain names to specify the location of the CMS.

  Note: Ensure that the host name you use does not include any of the following characters: an underscore (_), a period (.), a backslash (\), or a forward-slash (/).

• Ensure that your database client and server are set up to use Unicode character encoding, such as UTF-8. See your database documentation to determine the settings that are required for a Unicode configuration.
• If you are installing BusinessObjects Enterprise in a firewall environment, you need additional configuration details. See Firewalls.
• If you are clustering multiple file repository servers on separate computers, ensure that each server has read and write permissions to the folder used to store data.
• If you connect BusinessObjects Enterprise to a web application server, the web application server must be able to communicate with all BusinessObjects Enterprise computers. The BusinessObjects Enterprise Software Development Kit (SDK) enables this communication. The SDK is installed as part of the Web Tier components. If you plan to use a Java application server and your existing application server does not include a version of the Java Development Kit (JDK) that BusinessObjects Enterprise supports, install the supported version.

  Note: See the various Supported Platforms documents on the CA Business Intelligence DVD for a detailed list of supported environments and hardware requirements. These documents include specific version and patch-level requirements for databases, web application servers, web browsers, and operating systems. However, remember that your CA Technologies product's supported platforms take precedence over BusinessObjects Enterprise supported platforms.