Configuration for SAP BPC (BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation) 7.5 for Microsoft

Our 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.