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Load balancing and high availability

High availability is the capability of a system to deliver a service in an expected time span without failing. This capability is especially important in high-load environments when there are many concurrent users who are reliant on accessing and analyzing large volumes of data to run operations and make decisions.

BMC Dashboards for BSM is designed for optimal workload distribution and data availability in high-load environments. In environments with large numbers of concurrent users, corresponding large volumes of data, and the need to have a high up-time, the best practice deployment architectures are often based on horizontal scalability and failover capabilities. With clustering provided in BMC Dashboards for BSM, heavy workloads are distributed across multiple servers and avoid a single point of failure.

For illustrations and explanations about the deployment options for BMC Dashboards for BSM, see Deployment-options.

Support for failover and high-availability environments

The following enhancements have been made so that you can install and configure BMC Dashboards for BSM in highly available environments:

  • Clustered BMC Atrium DIL component - the BMC Atrium DIL component can now be installed in a cluster. The clustering technology used by the BMC Atrium DIL component (Composite Active Cluster) allows all metadata requests and changes to be automatically propagated across all nodes in the cluster.

    The clustered BMC Atrium DIL component has the following restrictions:
    • There must be one primary BMC Atrium DIL server and at least one secondary BMC Atrium DIL server in a BMC Atrium DIL cluster
    • The BMC Atrium DIL servers must be homogenous; that is, they must be all UNIX, all Windows, or all Linux.
    • The BMC Atrium DIL server must be installed on a separate computer from the BMC Dashboards for BSM application server component.
    • Some load balancers may require that the load balancer and the BMC Atrium DIL servers be installed in the same subnet.
    • Some hardware load balancers may require that you install the BMC Dashboards for BSM component (application server and client) on a separate subnet than the load balancer and the BMC Atrium DIL servers.
  • Clustered BMC Dashboards for BSM application server component -- the BMC Dashboards Tomcat application server now supports being installed in a cluster.
    • The clustered BMC Dashboards for BSM component allows the workload to be distributed across multiple Apache tomcat servers, so that multiple requests from several concurrent users are processed simultaneously. The clustered BMC Dashboards for BSM application server component has the following restrictions:
    • There must be one primary BMC Dashboards for BSM application server and at least one secondary BMC Dashboards for BSM application server in an application server cluster.
    • The BMC Dashboards for BSM application server must be installed on a separate computer from the BMC Atrium DIL server.
    • The BMC Atrium DIL servers and the application servers require a separate load balancer, and the load balancers must be installed on different subnets.
    • Some load balancers may require that the load balancer and the BMC Dashboards for BSM application servers be installed in the same subnet.
    • Some hardware load balancers (CISCO, for example) may require that you install the BMC Dashboards for BSM application server component on a different subnet than the load balancer and the BMC Atrium DIL servers.
    • You must install a new Apache Tomcat for a clustered configuration. Existing Tomcat installations are not supported.
  • Support for external BMC Atrium DIL caching database -- You can now install the BMC Atrium DIL component using an existing Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server database. Using an Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server database allows the BMC Atrium DIL component to cache the data that it receives from the data sources.

If are planning to have a clustered deployment, but you want to install a standalone configuration first in a test environment, BMC Software recommends that you install a dual-server deployment, where the BMC Atrium DIL server and BMC Dashboards for BSM application server are on different computers. Using the dual-server deployment reduces the amount of manual steps required when you later reconfigure your standalone configuration to a clustered configuration. For more information about reconfiguring your installation, see Reconfiguration-options.

 

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