Creating IBM Business Monitor clusters

In a network deployment (ND) environment, IBM® Business Monitor components must be deployed to clusters.

Before you begin

Before creating clusters and configuring the IBM Business Monitor components, ensure that you have performed the following tasks:

You have installed IBM Business Monitor.
You have created the IBM Business Monitor deployment manager profile or augmented an existing deployment manager profile with IBM Business Monitor.
You have created the MONITOR database.
You have started the deployment manager.
You have created and federated at least one IBM Business Monitor custom profile or augmented an existing custom profile with IBM Business Monitor.
You have started the custom profile or profiles.

About this task

Use an existing custom profile to create the first cluster member. You can add as many additional cluster members as you want in each cluster that you create (see "Adding cluster members"). To create the IBM Business Monitor cluster, complete the following steps from the administrative console:

Procedure

In the navigation panel, click Servers > Clusters > WebSphere application server clusters.
Click New to start the Create a new cluster wizard.
Specify a name for the cluster.
Select Prefer local to enable host-scoped routing optimization. This setting improves performance by looking up EJBs in a cluster member on the same node whenever possible.
Click Next to proceed to the Create first cluster member step.
Specify the name of the first cluster member.
Specify a node for the first cluster member. This node must be an IBM Business Monitor node.
Select the option to Create the member using an application server template.
Select an application server template containing the text defaultWBM in the name, and click Next.
Important: If there is no template with defaultWBM in the name, make sure that you have selected a node that has been augmented with IBM Business Monitor.
If the first cluster member is not created using an application server template with defaultWBM in the name, your IBM Business Monitor environment will not function properly, and you will have to delete all the existing cluster members and re-create the first cluster member.
Click Next to proceed to the Create additional cluster members step.
Optional: To add additional cluster members, complete the following steps for each cluster member:
1. Specify a unique name for the additional member. The name must be unique within the node.
2. Specify a node for the additional cluster member. This node must be an IBM Business Monitor node.
3. Click Add member.
Click Next to proceed to the summary panel.
Review the information and click Finish.
Click Save to save changes to the master configuration.

What to do next

After initially creating a cluster, you can add additional cluster members at any time.

To start a cluster the first time after the IBM Cognos® Business Intelligence service is installed, start each server individually. Do not use the ripplestart option, because this option does not give IBM Cognos BI enough time to initialize.

The administrative console might report issues when you first start the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence server. The initialization of each server instance in the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence content store database and disk area during the first startup takes much longer than a normal IBM Cognos Business Intelligence startup.