BMC AR System and BMC Atrium Core CMDB environment high availability

To build a highly available system, each tier in the BMC Remedy AR System server needs to be built with redundancy. The obvious tiers to the system are the mid tier, the BMC Remedy AR System (AR System) server, and the database. But depending on the criticality of the installation, other devices such as load balancers and firewalls should also be considered for redundancy. A failure at any of these levels can cause the service to become unavailable.

The following topics are covered in this section:

BMC Remedy Mid Tier

The BMC Remedy Mid Tier (mid tier) is the web component and is hosted in a web container (like Apache Tomcat). For high availability in this tier, you can run multiple mid tiers simultaneously, with a load balancer distributing the load among the different instances. If one of the mid tier instances fails, the load balancer detects the failure and directs traffic to the other instances.

BMC Remedy AR System server

The AR System server can also run behind a load balancer, with multiple instances working to process incoming API calls. The AR System server provides a built in mechanism called Server Groups that allow multiple AR System servers to share responsibilities among themselves, thereby providing additional deployment options. With such a setup, the load is distributed by the load balancer, and the servers collaborate to manage the execution of batch operations (like escalations) and administrator responsibilities.

For more information about server group configuration, see the BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite Installing and Configuring Server Groups guide.

Database layer

For a highly available deployment, ensure that the database is redundant. The redundancy at this layer is based on the options provided by the database vendor.

BMC Atrium CMDB

BMC Atrium CMDB runs as a hosted application inside the BMC Remedy AR System server, and so inherits the same level of high availability with which the BMC Remedy AR System server has been configured.