I tried a different approach the end of last week, and hit another brick wall today, but in answer to your question yes, I did get the member server to take over admin opns when I took the admin server down and left it down. The Server Group Check Interval was at the default (60 sec) and the Delinquent Threshold at 2, and about three minutes after I downed the admin server the member server changed its seven -Suspended flags from "T" to "F" and cleared the three Disable flags in the Server Information - Configuration tab. The email service on the member server resumed and connected to that server. The flashboards server function _appears_ to have moved over (the Change Management Dashboard is working), but the logs are full of connection errors and puking java so it's hard to say; the errors seem to be against the AR Server that each instance was NOT installed against, so maybe it's "normal."
What I can't test is the failover of the CMDB and Reconciliation services - because they absolutely refuse to install on the member server. In this test, I completely installed a fresh stack of 7.6.03 software - ARS, Atrium, ITSM, SRM, RKM, SLM - as a stand-alone server, and then installed a second AR Server to share the same database. ARS installs fine, and configured successfully (I think) as a server group - I rebooted both servers until they settled down and stopped changing their ar.cfg files. Unfortunately, Atrium refuses to install on the member server with the server group active, and it HAS to be active since you don't want it writing over the existing CMDB. The error is [BMC Atrium CMDB - This feature cannot be installed on a remote AR server]. If you go on and install AIS and AIE, AIE installs (and cannot be uninstalled since the idiot uninstaller will COMPLETELY REMOVE the AIE system from the db even if other instances remain installed), and the AIS service installs, but none of the plugin entries are added to the ar.cfg so the AIS test generates plugin errors. You may recall that in the previous test I installed the two AR Servers, configured the server group, successfully installed Atrium on the admin server AND on the member server (in that run it detected the server group and installed properly, I think), and then completely failed to install ITSM 7.6.03 properly on ANY server. It's like the various 7.6.03 application installers are completely lost in a server group environment, no matter which way you throw the switches. My conclusion so far is that even if you eventually manage to hack and band-aid the installs until you finally forced the apps to install in a server group (and so far I haven't even come close to achieving that), they will be unfit to put into production because it will be impossible to maintain them with patches or upgrades. Maybe this stuff works better in the *nix world, but I'll never know; it certainly isn't working in plain-Jane Windows 2003 Server x64. Maybe it's only supposed to work for the AR Server underneath custom or non-BMC applications. Christopher Strauss, Ph.D. Call Tracking Administration Manager University of North Texas Computing & IT Center http://itsm.unt.edu/ -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arsl...@arslist.org] On Behalf Of Murnane, Phil Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2010 1:07 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: DNS entry for Server Group Christopher: Did you ever get you 7.6.03 server group to fail over properly? I have a customer that's planning to update their 7.1 ARS server groups, and we're trying to figure out whether 7.5 or 7.6 is best for now. Thanks! --Phil _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug11 www.wwrug.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are"
