Pre-Installation Tasks

When you and your SAS representative initially plan the deployment of SAS Enterprise Miner, your SAS representative will record your decisions about which software you will deploy and on which hardware that software will be installed. This information is used to generate a deployment plan file.

A deployment plan is an XML file that is used as input to the SAS Deployment Wizard. There are two types of deployment plans: standard and custom. A standard deployment plan describes a common configuration. Standard deployment plans are stored by default in the SAS Software Depot. A custom deployment plan is created by a SAS representative specifically for a site.

If your environment requires a custom plan, SAS sends you an email message with either a set of files or a ZIP file that has a set of files. Those files include the following:

The SAS 9.4 Intelligence Platform: Installation and Configuration Guide provides detailed information about deployment plans and pre-installation tasks.

When you download a SAS order, the SAS Download Manager automatically creates a SAS Software Depot on your system. For more details about creating your software depot, see “Creating a SAS Software Depot” in the SAS 9.4 Intelligence Platform: Installation and Configuration Guide.

The SAS 9.4 Intelligence Platform: Installation and Configuration Guide provides detailed information related to all installations that include all or part of the SAS 9.4 Intelligence Platform, including SAS Enterprise Miner. SAS Enterprise Miner is bundled with several other SAS products that are not covered in detail by this guide. It is important that you become familiar with the SAS 9.4 Intelligence Platform: Installation and Configuration Guide.

You should also familiarize yourself with the following:

As a pre-installation task, you must designate or create a domain account that will act as the SAS Installer. This account will require administrative operating system privileges on each machine that hosts the SAS Enterprise Miner server, a SAS Workspace server, or SAS Enterprise Miner project files. On a Windows system, this account also requires the permissions log on as a batch job and Access this computer from the network. The logon permission permits the user to be logged on by means of a batch-queue. You can configure this security setting by opening the appropriate policy and adding each account. Generally, it is recommended that you create a user group, and give the group the Log on as a batch job, and, if necessary, the Access this computer from the network permission. Then, add each account to that group. For UNIX, the SAS Installer account should not be the root account.

The Access this computer from the network permission is also required in order to connect to SAS servers. Typically, this right is already granted to the Windows group Everyone. To confirm, check the Windows local policy settings.

The SAS Enterprise Miner server uses both regular user accounts and product administrative user accounts. You can create regular user accounts for the SAS Enterprise Miner as a post-installation task. For more information, see Define Additional Enterprise Miner Users in Chapter 7.

Note that a product administrator account is not the same as a SAS internal administrator account, such as the SAS Administrator (sasadm@saspw).

The communications between the components of SAS Enterprise Miner require a number of ports that must be designated during the installation process. Consult the pre-installation checklist that is provided by your SAS representative for a complete list of ports that you must designate. The SAS 9.4 Intelligence Platform: Installation and Configuration Guide has more information about port requirements and selection in the “Setting Up Users, Groups, and Ports.”

A SAS environment file defines the available set of SAS environments for the SAS Enterprise Miner server’s client applications, and is generated during the configuration of the SAS Web Infrastructure Platform. This step is carried out by the SAS Deployment manager when you install the SAS Enterprise Miner server. The SAS Logon Manager includes a servlet that provides default information for the initial deployment.

When you have validated that your client applications work successfully with a deployment, it is recommended that you deploy the sas-environment.xml file to an HTTP server. This step ensures that you can customize the sas-environment.xml file to specify the name that you want to use and to account for the IT topology at your site. Your site might require that application clients interact with separate development, test, and production environments. Or, you might choose to have separate SAS deployments to support distinct business units. In either scenario, when multiple environments are required, you can customize and deploy the sas-environment.xml file as needed.

Before starting the SAS Enterprise Miner server installation, you must determine the URL that is needed to access the default installation sas-environment.xml. The URL to access the default environment definition would be http://<host>:<port>/sas/sas-environment.xml. For example, if you are running a SAS Application Server on your desktop, you can deploy the default sas-environment.xml file at http://localhost:80/sas/sas-environment.xml.

For the SAS Enterprise Miner server the default URL would resemble the following: http://myserver.mynet.mycompany.com:80/sas/sas-environment.xml.

For more details about the SAS environment file and how to configure SAS environments pre- or post-installation see the SAS 9.4 Intelligence Platform: Middle-Tier Administration Guide.

SAS Enterprise Miner server installation uses an included JRE. For SAS 9.4, you must use JRE 1.7.0_17, or later versions. The SAS Enterprise Miner server installation requires Windows PowerShell 2.0. You can determine the version of PowerShell by opening the Windows PowerShell command prompt and entering $PSVersionTable.

When installing SAS Enterprise Miner, you must provide valid paths to the required third-party software, or the SAS Deployment Wizard will not let you continue with the SAS Enterprise Miner server installation. For information about required versions of third-party software, see the Third-Party Software for SAS 9.4 available from the SAS Support Install Center, located at http://support.sas.com/resources/thirdpartysupport/.

Installations that include SAS Text Miner will be prompted for the host and port for SAS Document Conversion service. SAS Document Conversion runs on both Windows and UNIX platforms. It works with any version of Microsoft Windows that supports Microsoft .NET Framework and can run 32-bit applications. This includes any 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows that run in compatibility mode. On both platforms, when SAS Enterprise Miner and SAS Text Miner are installed, SAS Document Conversion is installed on the same machine automatically.

SAS Text Miner uses the SAS Document Conversion server to extract plain text from proprietary file formats such as PDF and Microsoft Word so that the text can be analyzed by SAS Text Miner. The SAS Text Miner components communicate with the document conversion service over the network. The SAS Document Conversion readme file in the SAS Software Depot provides additional information.