EE is 90 minutes before the regular opening...so a 9 a.m. opening would be 7:30 EE.
There's no special entrance for it. But you DO need special passes.
I'd get to the entrance at least a half hour before EE -- in your case, 7 -- because the lines can get long, and they have a tendency to let people in a few minutes early.
One note: One morning, we were standing in line at the monorail entrance in Downtown Disney for EE and monorail Orange was having trouble...so the monorails were not able to run when they were supposed to and a lot of people decided to NOT wait (the 15 or 20 extra mins that it was going to take to take monorail orange off the track) and had to walk to the Disneyland entrance.....and even though they didn't have far to walk, it still took time away from being IN the park at EE opening. There was a lot of **grumbling** as people got out of the monorail line to walk to Disneyland.