Configuring SAP Control Center to Manage Multiple ASE Servers on a Single Host
Have you ever wondered how to configure the SCC local agent to manage multiple ASE servers on a single host?
SAP Control Center or SCC is designed to be an enterprise management system for multiple data management products, like SAP ASE or SAP IQ. It is capable of managing multiple instances of these products and, although running multiple high-performance servers on a single host machine can lead to resource contention and unpredictable performance, we know that there are times when it makes sense to do so. A common example might be a development or QA environment where performance is not as high a priority as is efficient utilizationof your limited hardware resources.
Most of the SCC management and monitoring features do not depend on the location of the server that SCC is managing. All you need is a login to the server and you can register that server with SCC. This will allow you to monitor your server performance, administer the server configuration and manage the resources in the server.
But there are a few features in SCC that require the services of a local SCC agent so that SCC can interact directly with the operating system and the files, such as the server error log, located on that machine. One key example is the ability to start your ASE server when it has been shutdown.
The SCC Agent Plugin for ASE doesn’t automatically support these operations on more than one instance of the ASE server on a single host machine. How, then, can you use SCC to monitor the errorlogs or to gain the ability to start multiple ASE servers in such a situation? Can this even be done?
Fortunately, the steps for configuring the SCC ASE AgentPlugin for multiple ASE servers are pretty simple. All you need to do is to create a separate instance of the ASE Agent Plugin directory for each of the ASE servers that you want to manage and to configure each agent plugin properly to connect to and manage each individual ASE server. Once this is done, SCC will be able to start and stop your server and monitor the server errorlog. In addition, you will be able to setup ASE errorlog alerts based on specific messages found in the ASE errorlog! (A topic for another blog.)
This is a manual process. You will need to have access to the ASE host machine, have a local SCC agent installed on the machine (see the SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise Installation Guide for your ASE server version and platform for instructions for doing this) and be prepared to shutdown your local SCC agent briefly while performing these configuration steps.
Here are the steps for manually adding a new ASE server to the local agent.
1) Shutdown the SCC agent. This is typically done from the SCC console command line.
2) cd to the $SYBASE/SCC-3_3/plugins directory.
3) Find the com.sybase.ase directory under the plugins directory and copy this entire directory to a new directory of a different name under the plugins directory – probably using the name of the ASE server that you want to manage for the new directory name, but the name doesn’t matter to SCC.
4) Now cd to the new directory and edit the agent-plugin.xml file. This may already have some configuration information in it for your other ASE server but you will modify this information to match the values for the ASE server that you want to manage.
5) Set the values of the following properties appropriately for the new ASE server:
<set-property property=”ase.password” value=””/> <<= The ASE administrator or sa password *
<set-property property=”ase.port” value=”” /> <<= ASE listening port in interfaces file
<set-property property=”ase.server.log” value=”” /> <<= Absolute path to the ASE errorlog
<set-property property=”ase.server.name” value=””/> <<= Name of the server in the interfaces file
<set-property property=”ase.start.command” value=””/> <<= Absolute path to the ASE startup script
<set-property property=”ase.user” value=”sa” /> <<= ASE administrator login or leave as sa
* The administrator password must be encrypted. To generate an encrypted value, use the passencrypt (or passencrypt.bat) utility that is found in the $SYBASE/SCC-3_3/bin directory. Run this utility and enter your password value when prompted to do so. Copy the encrypted text that passencrypt returns into the ase.password value field in the agent-plugin.xml file as shown above.
6) Now start the SCC server again. Your new ASE Agent Plugin configuration will take effect at this point.
7) Log into the SCC server from your web browser.
If you have not already registered your ASE server with the SCC server, perform step 8, otherwise, skip to step 9.
8) Register the new ASE server in SCC. The steps for doing this are documented in the SAP Control Center for
Adaptive Server Enterprise Users Guide (see http://infocenter.sybase.com/help/topic/com.sybase.infocenter.dc01265.0330/doc/html/git1258566940654.html).
9) Select your server in the SCC Perspective Resources View and pull down the menu for the server and open the
Administration Console. Next, open the Server Properties Sheet for your server within the Administration Console and select the Agent tab.
10) Register and authenticate the agent for the new server. Use the same agent port and authentication
credentials that were used when registering the agent for the other ASE server on the same host machine. (See http://infocenter.sybase.com/help/topic/com.sybase.infocenter.dc01265.0330/doc/html/git1258504913487.html)
11) At this point SCC should be all configured. Test by viewing the server errorlog in SCC or by shutting down and starting the ASE server from within SCC.