Our company is looking to begin the migration to XI R2 and I was looking for some documentation on the architecture best practices.
I am looking at a total of 150 concurrent active users based on the 10-20% baseline. Also, going by the calculation provided by the BO Sizing guide there would be about 68 simultaneous user requests.
We are trying to decide whether to run all services off of one server (dual proc). Have any of you run everything off one server with this many users/requests?
Also how does the licensing work with the WebI server? (We are a 100% BO shop and will only be using WebI/DI as we are Pro not Premium).
I appreicate any information. Please let me know if any other informatin is needed, thanks again.
This goes with any enterprise-level software application, you should not install everything on a single box. Single point of failure is one thing, you are not taking advantage of a highly scalable software architecture.
Having said that, this is the beauty of XI’s SOA architecture. When the needs arise or when you find the server is overloaded, you can always move the services out of that box to other servers.
You atleast need two servers to start with for scalability and Load balancing.
Install a CMS on each box and also 2 WebI services for failover on each box.
The WebI report viewing consumes only a BOE license but not the WebI license.
Where as the WebI report creation consumes a license approx $300 and also the BOE license
Thanks for your post. BOBJ documentation does not discuss the two server enviroment you highlight in your post. Do you or anyone else viewing this have a 2 server PRD environment on Win2k3 Enterprise & XI rel. 2?
Like to understand lessons learned & how you assigned BOBJ processes to the 2 servers for redundancy & scale
The assignment is relative to your environment. For ex if you have lot of WebI Reports being created then you need to have multiple WebI Report Servers. If the WebI reports are being scheduled frequently then you need multiple WebI Job Servers, but the exact number of the servers is dependent on the number of users and report creation/scheduling etc.
If you have users who run Crystal Reports then you need multiple Crystal Page Servers/Crytal Job Servers/Cache Servers.
Preferably on different Physical Machines, so if there is a total Hardware Failure or the Entire server goes down, the other physical server will still be available. This multiple server environment is good even if you need to bring down any server for maintenance or updates.
2 CMS and two Web Application servers provide a good reliable envrionment. These two web application servers need to be connected through a Big IP load balancer so the load is equally balanced to the Servers. If one CMS goes down the other can still work independently
The “as-is” with the BOBJ 6.5 implmention here is that appx 25-30 power users hit the server on a regular basis running, refreshing and creating webi reports. Another 50-60 users read the reports that exist that are either refreshed by the power users or via a preiodic process.
I predict with that with XI implementation, the number of reports being created and refreshed by the user will decrease but the view and sort will increase. We will also increase the number of reports that are refreshed during “off peak” hours so that system performance is not greatly impacted by everyone hitting the refresh button for a report that runs against “static” data.
Not an issue. We may roll out Crystal to the power users in a subsuquent “wave”.
Understood. These are great points you have provided and have me walking down a slightly different path the model the technical architecture for our install of XI rel. 2.
Does anyone have experience installing XI rel. 2 in PRD with 25-75 users on a single or dual box configuration??
First of all, I believe there are very few brave souls out there who have already installed XIr2 in production. Most people are installing on development or testing environment at this time. Secondly, the architecture of release 2 is the same as the release 1, therefore, you might have a better luck to find people who have experience installing and running XI release 1 in production.
By the way, we are currently running 2 CMS servers in cluster and 3 web app servers using Apache Tomcat. All the services are distributed to several other servers. We anticipate when fully implemented, we will have potentially 16,000 users. We have a whole lot more users than you have, but I hope this will give you some ideas.
Does anyone know what the reference model (hardware) that was used to develop the boe_sizing_recommendations.pdf document? We need the information on what type of server, CPU and speed so that we can extrapolate the info relative to the hardware we use (IBM). It seems, on the surface, that they used Wintel servers.
BO Tech support, our acct. manager and BO pre-sales support are slow to respond to my inquiries.
This is also a question on architecture; we are on 5.1.8 Full Client 2 tier architecture and looking to migrate to Xi rel 2. What I understand of an equivalent Desktop Intelligence (DI) Xi Rel2 is, it is sort 3 tier. The DI will be on the client, then we have another CMS server (and a database repository attached to it) and all client request from DI goes via CMS server. CMS Server is more powerful in Xi Rel 2 as the documents / universes etc have been moved from database repository to CMS (storage part of it) which leaves the database repository lighter than before. If we are just going for the DI deployment (no webi at all), then I hope CMS server need not be as powerful as others mentiong on this discussion above. It is still critical as corporate documents etc. earlier resided on the db repository is coming to the file server on the CMS; but it will be even more critical for Web Intelligence based architecture. I’m trying to present my management here on options to be considered for purely DI installation, Webi installation etc. Do I make sense ? I’m jut tryig to explain myself and please let me know if I have gone wrong. We have app. 225 users; 175 driller and 50 full client…
I don’t have any insight on your actual question, but I do have a question for you. If you are wanting a pure Desktop Intelligence installation, why upgrade to XI? Business Objects has NO plans for additional enhancements to Desktop Intelligence. Unless it is just a stepping stone to eventual migration to Crystal and / or Web Intelligence, you might consider just moving to 6.5. Just something to consider.
I know this may not be a helpfull response but I suggest you go on the Design and Deploy course which covers designing an infrastructure for many different evantualities.
Dwayne, I take your point. I was trying to give option to our management; my personal preference is to go the Webi way. But that involves cost on another server(s); browser based reporting for end users which will be a big change in our case; a bit more difficult to push in terms of cost. But I beleieve that is the right way to go. In the case of 6.5; question remains - what happens after 6.5 ? Why would you want to go from BO 5i -> 6i -> Xi
Well, that is for your management to decide. Do they want to save a few bucks now and spend more money in the long run? In another word, are they looking at short term goal or long term goal? For short term, upgrade to 6.5. BOBJ should continue to support it for at least 5 more years or so. In the long run, you will either have to get on board or you will have problem finding resources not just developing but maintaining your older system. Let me give you an example. I have some friends who are FoxPro programmers. They told me many shops that are stilling using FoxPro are having hard time to find good FoxPro programmers. Why? it is because most of them have either moved on to .NET or jumped ship to Java/J2EE. Keep in mind that not only hardwares are expensive, human resources can cost you an arm and a leg as well. I can tell you that, 5 years from now, you will have a very hard time to find good developers who are willing to work on version 5 and version 6 of BO.
IMHO, you should not. But if your management have difficulty getting the funding, moving to 6.5 can buy them some time (for the reason stated above). But your management MUST understand that it is not a long term solution. They need to have a good strategy on how to move out of 6.5 in the next few years.
Just to extend the sizing/specification question a bit more. In the recommended settings guide for XIR2 is states the following Recommended setting for a W2K3 Server
Number of CPU’s 4
Type of CPU xeon P4 1.5 Ghz Minimum
Memory 4GB Min
Disk Size 4GB min free space + Storage
File System Type NTFS
Swap Space default
Disk Type SCSI
Network Client to Middle Tier 100 Mbps
Network CArd Type Ethernet
Network Card Number 1
I know it is somehat dependent on the user footprint but does anybody know the number of users that this would support. I mean Business Objects must baseline it on some assumptions[/u]
1 CPU will support 600 concurrent users and 1 CMS can support similar number of concurrent users. But you have to base line it depending on wether you will be using it for WebIntelligence reports or Crystal reports how many number of users, user types, frequency of usage etc.
1 WebI Report Server would support 25 simultaneous connections.
etc.
Its not just the hardware architecture but also your environment. The number of Active,moderate, Heavy and light users.
So if you define all those then it will drive your hardware.
So instead of first designing the Hardware you need to first quantify your Reporting environment needs and then design the hardware.
I read the BO XI R2 supported platform doc and it says the minimum hardware requirements are P3 700MHz, 1GB RAM, 5GB HD. But I don’t know if it is for the server or also for the client (I want to install FC on my pc).
I read the irish_stan post so I’m thinking it’s for the client but i’m not sure at all.
I have a P4 1.7GHz, 512 RAM so i need to know if it is enough or if i need more RAM.
I have a single universe and 60/70 reports.
Note that on the support site the Lifecycle plan for 6.5 is quite public at http://support.businessobjects.com/programs/lifecycle/busobjent.asp and the very latest that 6.5 will be supported- at the highest service pack level - will be June 2008- just over 3 years away. At that point to continue support all customers will have to be on an XI platform or higher. XI and R2 on the other hand, have support lifecycles over 5 years visible at http://support.businessobjects.com/programs/lifecycle/busobjxi.asp currently extending to late 2009.
Just wondering if any one is working on Solaris 8 /9 with Sybase IQ /ASE environment. We are in the process of migrating into XIR2 but our current production environment which lies on ASE 12.0 and IQ 12.4.3 would not be supported by BO XIR2, so I have been stuck to find a better methodology to achieve the migration and above all we can not upgrade our OS / DB before the applications due to other infrastrucutre dependencies!!!
I am moving towards split methodology as I would install and create an instance of ASE12.5 DB server for the CMS repository and this would be parallel to our current BO 5.1.x running against ASE12.0. Once we comeplete our tests and are satisfied we would shutdown BO 5.1.X / Webi 2.7.2 and redirect traffic to Webi XIr2.
Has any one got any inputs on this methodology? What are factors I would need to consider / any constrains you think of etc…
Also, has any one come across any date format issues with XIR2 to accomodate british / australian date formats.
We just installed an XIr2 dev server with some consultants and have a serious concern about DesKI scalability (we are 99% full client on demand). In 6.5 BOMgr.exe distributes work to the busobj.exe process pool as users request refreshes. Consequently our sizing is primarily based on concurrent active users, i.e. simultaneous refreshes.
In XIr2, there does not appear to be a process distributing work. Rather, when a user requests a DeskI report, they are assigned a dedicated busobj.exe process for the life of their session. That would require us to size based purely on connected users. The consultant said the 6.5 sizing guide recommendation of 4-5 busobj.exe processes/CPU hasn’t changed for XIr2. That could easily translate to tripling the number of servers needed to support our production user base. If true, that’s one heck of a cattle prod to convert to WebI docs.
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