Forum Discussion
NimbostratusConfiguration for SAP BPC (BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation) 7.5 for Microsoft
We run SAP BPC 7.5 for Microsoft, and are currently "load balancing" the web servers using Barracuda load balancers. We would like to migrate to our new LTM devices, but are unsure about how to most appropriately configure LTM for BPC. We are running LTM v11.
The web servers are Windows Server 2008 R2 and run IIS, but a BPC web server depends on a lot of Windows services and COM+ components to function properly. SAP doesn't seem to have published any configuration best practices, and our BPC VAR doesn't have any experience with F5, though it is one of the recommended load balancing platforms for BPC.
We'll start to stumble through it ourselves if nobody has anything to share, but I thought I'd check first.
Thanks in advance :)
4 Replies
What_Lies_Bene1Cirrostratus
Perhaps you (and/or your VAR) can describe the current configuration and, where the VAR is concerned, what they do on other platforms. We can take it from there.
Alex_K__114370Our current configuration (on the Barracuda Load Balancer) is very, very simple. ICMP tests to see if the servers are online, which aren’t very effective, since a lot has to go wrong with the server before ICMP tests fail. Ideally, we would test to see if IIS was up, as well as checking the status of a couple of Windows services and COM+ components. Round Robin Load Balancing.
Per the VAR, they recommend the following:
• Persistence setting needs to be set for at least 10 minutes. This will prevent users from being sent to different applications on each request, which would cause errors.
• There is a TCP idle timeout setting in F5, make sure this is set pretty long (at least 2 hours) or disable it all together. This can also cause errors of the type “Empty XML” in Excel if a process takes longer than this time-out setting.
• Sometimes companies want to set up SSL certificates on the F5 rather than the IIS servers. While this may improve performance, it will not be that noticeable and needs to make sure that the port forwarding is configured carefully is you are going to use certificates.
• The least connections load balancing algorithm has worked best for me in BPC environments to make sure that the user load is balanced. If you are however using Citrix I recommend you use round robin instead. (We aren’t using Citrix today, though we may publish it through our Citrix environment in the future).
I don’t think that I’m going to be able to provide enough information to allow you to offer detailed advice in my particular situation, but if you could start me out in the right direction, it would be great.- What_Lies_Bene1OK, so far it's sounding simple. A few more questions;
1) Do the servers perform HTTP compression? If not, doing this on the F5 will provide some significant performance benefits but we'd need to terminate the SSL on them too. We can always use SSL from the F5 to the back end servers again.
2) Regarding the monitors, there a fair few options but ideally there is a page we can probe which will only return a certain output if the Windows services etc. are actually running. Is there such a page? - What_Lies_Bene1OK, thanks. Are there multiple pages that would provide an overall health picture? One or more for services, one or more for the COM+ parts?
