SAP Business Objects BI 4,1 cluster Fail Over

[former_member586404]

Hello,
We have 2 node BO 4.1 SP7 Patch 1 cluster set up in dev environment. How ever we want to do fail over and load balancing exercise?

Can some one give some clue about how to perform fail over test from node1 to node 2 as well as load balancing?

[Joe_Peters]

The obvious answer is to shut one node down and see what happens. What else are you looking for?

[former_member586404]

Joe,

Can I do this way?
1) schedule a long running job through node 2 cmc?

Then shutdown SIA service oin node2.

Will the job be transferred to node1? This is what we are trying to test for fail over

[DellSC · Accepted solution]

Load balancing for the application nodes in BOBJ automatically happens - there's not really anything you can do to modify it. I don't know that it's exactly round-robin - it may have it's own internal logic to determine what goes to which node. To verify that it's occurring (which I've never had to do with any of my clients in the last 8 years), you can check the metrics on the various servers.

To test fail-over of the nodes, just stop the SIA on one of the servers while one or more users are logged in to the system. Before you do this, make sure that you have configured the cluster for the web applications - logging in to a specific server from the web apps or any of the desktop apps may cause fail-over to fail for that session.

If you're running Tomcat and the web apps on the same servers as the nodes, you'll need a separate load balancer to handle that. You would test this the same way you test anything through the load balancer.

-Dell

[denis_konovalov]

You did not provide any details of your environment, so it is hard to say if you can do a proper test.
Some basic things you can do is check Metrics of your Webi processing servers or CR processing servers, you should see a fairly close number of served requests.
this tells you that load balancing of requests for backend processing is working.

As to fail-over , as Joe said - shut one node down, see what happens.

[former_member586404]

We have 2 node cluster SBOP BI 41 SP7 patch 7on Windows Server R 2012 with 64 GB memory each. Right now, we have both servers considered as active ( nothing set up through load balancer). Both share same CMS database and each of them has its own tom cat services.

Only shared is CMS database on oracle and FRS on shared storage SAN disk.

We want to do some proof of concept about fail over of a job

[denis_konovalov]

In your current configuration you have one piece that is not load balanced - BOE webapps on tomcat server.
you need to setup load balancer in front of your tomcats to balance HTTP(s) requests from users.

When you talk about fail over - are you talking about failover of the user web session in BIlaunchpad/CMC or of the report processing session on the backend BOE services ?
The report processing job failover is built in into BOE architecture, same as load balancing of the processing requests and you can test it, but can't change or re-configure it.
The user web session failover implementation is dependent on wbapp servers used and load balancer and might not be 100% achievable for some workflows.

[former_member586404]

Thanks Dennis, My question was more about report processing session on the back end BOE service.

[omacoder]

1. Take the primary out of netscaler load
2. Disable all servers in CMC on the primary node
3. Validate all sessions have been terminated in Tomcat manager from the primary session
4. Validate all sessions in CMC have switched over their services to the backup CMC
5. Stop the SIA on the primary node