[CA Spectrum] Questions about Hardware + Software migration - VNM model issues ?

[yann.mornet]

Hello dear community.

 

I am about to perform a software + hardware migration of a Spectrum infrastructure which looks like the following.

OC - SS1 - SS2 (3 Physical servers, W2K8 SP1)

Version of Spectrum is 9.2.3 H10.

 

Installation will be performed on different servers because of hardware upgrade.

OC' - SS1' - SS2'

Target version is 9.4.3

 

The new machines will not have access to the monitored devices because only the production environment is entitled by the FW to ping and poll them.

Time of the migration is not a big issue (could be several days).  Any delta of devices which could appear meanwhile is manageable by the exploitation team after the migration.

 

The idea is the following :

1/ Get the SSdb of SS1 (events are not a problem) produced by Online Database Backup

2/ Unzip and copy it to SS1' as dbsavefile.SSdb as explained in the installation guide

3/ Install 9.4.0 on top of it.

4/ Perform migration 9.4.0 -> 9.4.3 for SS1'

5/ Install OC' and SS2' in 9.4.0 -> 9.4.3

6/ Configure fault tolerance for SS1'/SS2'

7/ "Copying" any customization designed on OC/SS1/SS2 to OC'/SS1'/SS2'

8/ Old Spectrum is shut down, the new spectum machines have their IPs changed

 

Since I am new to the installation of Spectrum on top an existing SSdb on a different machine, I wanted to try 1/ 2/ 3/ + installing a OC in 9.4.0 and see by myself if the migration of the SSdb was ok, that I could get the devices, the NCM settings, the Global collections, the setting of Online Database Backup....

 

So I did. I took a SSdb in 9.2.3 H10, copied it on a virtual machine for testing. The virtual machine has no possibility to join any equipment defined in the SSdb just if as I had a FW blocking problem.

 

What I could see when running OC for the first time surprised me.

1/ VNM name is the name of SS1 not SS1'. It has also the IP address of SS1. This IP address is not reachable by the VM.

2/ VNM is 'initial' in blue not green 'normal'.

3/ When I tried to stop the polling it did nothing, critical alarms of unreachable equipments continued to show up in My Spectrum.

4/ The VNM remembers SS2 and SS2 is showed up when running MapUpdate -v

 

Could you explain to me the reasons why the VNM behaves this way ?

I am puzzled by the 'wrong' IP address just if I had no VNM for my local server.

 

Is there something I missed ?

[Silvio Okamoto]

Beginning in Spectrum 9.3 you must specify the Character set encoding you will use for your Spectrum installation. Therefore, during a Spectrum 9.3/9.4 upgrade or migration, the installation process must convert all existing $SPECROOT/custom/Event files to the specified character encoding. At this point of the installation Spectrum renames the custom CsEvFormat (Event Format) files, Event Table files, and CsPCause (Probable Cause) files, and uses the native2ascii converter to convert the files to the proper character set for your installation.

 

4/ Copy all existing $SPECROOT/custom/Event files and sudirectories from Spectrum 9.2.3 to new OC host

5/ Install OC' and SS2' in 9.4.0 -> 9.4.3

 

I suspect the VNM model is in Initial condition because the SS cannot reach any modeled device in the SSdb.

What happens if you make a backup of "upgraded" SSdb (so you can restore later on) and then initialize to legacy and start the SpectroSERVER?

 

For item 4, you can follow this document:

How to remove or breakup the fault tolerance set up in Spectrum?

[yann.mornet]

We did install for real this time and we did not encounter any problems.

 

We had just noticed the

4/ The VNM remembers SS2 and SS2 is showed up when running MapUpdate -v

And we removed it with the MapUpdate command.

I guess what I saw was caused by the SS which could not reach any modeled device in the SSdb.

Thanks for you response.