Planning RMI 11.2: “Could not find the service start class” SOLUTION

I spent more time troubleshooting this than I care to admit. Rather than walking you through the things I tried, let’s cut to the chase!

 

Symptom Observed:
You start the “Oracle Hyperion RMI Registry” service in the Control Panel or via a script. The service shows it is running and no logfiles reveal an up/down status for it.

Meanwhile, your classic Planning batch scripts don’t work like they used to…

Digging deeper with traditional port checking tools, we see the RMI port 11333 is not listening.

Finally, we check the Windows Event Viewer.

Oh boy, this is going to be a long day…

Quick Tip:
Search engines and the Oracle Knowledge Base don’t have current information on this “could not find the service start class” error yet, at least not where Oracle EPM 11.2 is concerned. There’s some older articles out there about ports, service names, etc. that don’t lead you to a solution. Hopefully this blog entry will help!

Solution:
First, export this portion of your Windows Registry in case you want to roll back to the original configuration:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HyS9RMIRegistry_epmsystem1\Parameters

And here it is!

Planning RMI is still using the old Java 6.

I haven’t dug enough to find the exact culprit, but there’s likely a mix of Java class files in RMI where some were compiled with Java 6, and others with Java 8. Java 6 can’t run Java 8 classes, but Java 8 can often run both Java 6 and Java 8 classes.

So the trick is to locate a “jvm.dll” file that is Java 8 and 32-bit. I tried using a 64-bit one and it immediately complained I was mixing 32-bit and 64-bit.

In a vanilla EPM 11.2 system, you will have a 32-bit Java 8 if you allowed it to install the 32-bit Oracle Database Client. The file is:

\Oracle\Middleware\dbclient32\jdk\jre\bin\client\jvm.dll

Replace the “JVMLibrary” Data value in my screenshot above so your system looks like this:

Bounce RMI, and suddenly port 11333 is working and you may continue with your day.

Here’s hoping a more official fix will be forthcoming!