My bet is that the 7.6.03 Atrium installer will choke on this, even if it worked in 7.5 or 7.6. Every week I find more things that worked before that are now broken in 7.6.03 (the latest: on-line help for ITSM; the most problematic: everything you ever did with RKM no longer works; the worst: lost SSL support in tomcat as distributed with mid-tier). Can you say "beta tester?"
The scenario that you describe is one that I considered, but how would you maintain it when, say, a patch for SLM or ITSM comes out, or the "upgrades" to 7.6.04 are released??? Do you have to completely disassemble the server group, re-point ITSM2 to Orcl2, run the patches or upgrades, and then re-assemble the server group and re-point ITSM2 to the main db?? I'm not even sure that would work, and it would take a LOT more resources to test it first. If I don't have any reasonable expectation of being able to maintain the system over the next 3 years or more (we got 5 yrs out of our 5.1.2/5.5 system), I probably don't want to put it into production in such a lashed-together configuration. I'd love to be able to do this following a template from BMC on how to implement all of the apps on a server group in 7.6.03, a reasonable expectation for a complete new install, but I honestly don't think they ever tested it... at all!!! Support is essentially clueless, and keeps passing the issue around from group to group - none of whom seem to have worked with the ITSM Suite application stack in a server group environment (so far). 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:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Murnane, Phil Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 2010 9:46 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: DNS entry for Server Group Christopher: Ran into a customer a while back who had two stand-alone ITSM 7.5 servers they wanted to reconfigure to a server group, and BMC provided the following procedure: 1. On second AR Server, please run the same version of ARS installer again and select "Share" mode during the installation. 2. Also please select the Orcl1 database during the installation, so that both AR Servers will connect to single database (i.e. Both will be sharing same database in Server Group). 3. Then on Second server run same version of CMDB installer and run it in share mode. 4. You don't have to reinstall ITSM or other applications, 5. After the installation you can make configuration changes in both servers ar.cfg, also you can make necessary changes in Operations Ranking form. Oh, the starting configuration was ITSM1 on Orcl1 and ITSM2 or Orcl2. This looks like a variant of your second effort except instead of installing a member server into a server group, both servers are build independently and then merged into a group. Maybe in this procedure the Atrium installer will run after ITSM2 is pointed to Orcl1? Just a Thought, --Phil -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of strauss Sent: Monday, November 15, 2010 17:04 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: DNS entry for Server Group 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:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Murnane, Phil Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2010 1:07 PM To: [email protected] 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" _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug11 www.wwrug.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are" _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug11 www.wwrug.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are"
