Got another question from a reader of the Word for the community. A reader, JA, asks...
I need your help regarding documentum HA configuration on AIX. Do you have any documentation/links for Documentum HA configuration on AIX ?
The first piece of documentation I would point him to would be the Administration Guide. The "Failover and load balancing" section, page 164 in 6.5sp1 documentation, talks about it in brief. The dfc.properties file really defines rollover for the Connection Broker. There are a couple of smaller sections in the Admin guide that address failover.
Of course, the documentation on multiple content servers in a non-distributed environment is a little shakey. Support Note 98437 talks about how to "How to create a multiple server / single repository for load balancing". For simple reference, the content of that support note is here:
For a load balanced environment where you have multiple Content Servers and a single repository, the procedure to follow is documented in the Content Server installation guide under "Installing Remote Content-File Servers in Distributed Configurations".
Although the title is specific to Distributed, this also applies to the multi-server / single repository load balanced environment. This replaces an older procedure in the releases prior to 5.3 whereby the setup required manually creating a second server config object, creating a second install, and then running the configuration and ending at the headstart script.
This new procedure entails the following:
- Installing the Content Server on the primary host.
- Configuring the repository on the primary host
- Installing Content Server on the second host
- Running the CFSConfiguration utility on the second host. This utility creates the second server config object, copies over the necessary files such as aek.key, dmpassword.txt, server.ini, etc.
This process is also used for setting up a Distributed environment. So you can choose to setup a distributed storage location but it is not required for the load balanced portion. Instead, a single filestore can be shared between the two servers. Ensure that the installations of both primary and secondary servers are completed by a domain user account. A user account local to each server (even with the same name) are technically different accounts based on their uid. Using a domain account ensures access to the shared filestore location.
I've done this and it works. It creates a Docbroker for you. If you have an existing one on the second server, you need to remove it in order for the installer to work. It isn't intelligent enough to detect the Docbroker and move on.
I don't know of anything special to AIX versus other UNIX installation for HA. All my AIX specific issues were typically installation issues. Anyone have anything to ad or expand on this?
-Pie
