Cognos Planning Analyst and Contributor

Reasons to NOT consider VMware for your production environments

Overview

These days it is getting more and more common for I. T. departments to consider the use of Virtualisation products not only for the consolidation of existing servers, but also for deployments of new products in the server room. Whilst these products are ever improving and performance of applications in the guest operating systems can be described as "near-native" there are very good reasons not to virtualise your Cognos Planning servers.

Cognos Planning Analyst on VMware?

Analyst may well be the exception to this rule as it is a single-threaded application that, while it can be heavy on RAM, it is rarely too heavy on CPU usage, though separation of the Analyst Server and the Contributor servers would cause more problems than it solves so its barely worth considering.

There are however many customers who use Cognos Planning Analyst as a stand-alone product and for these customers creating a virtualised Analyst server may be a suitable solution.

Analyst only Servers on VMware

The Analyst server side installation is little more than a collection of configuration files and locking information together with a vast amount of data files, there are no services associated with Analyst its self so this is a prime target for virtualisation, especially if you are able to locate these data files on an iSCSI or similar SAN / NAS solution rather than a local Virtual Hard disk.

Since version 7.2 of Cognos Planning use of Access Manager as well as a directory server (typically Sun Java Directory Server) has been required for authentication and storage of users, this does involve a server-side service, though for most customers this can also reside inside of the virtual server. It is, after-all a LIGHT weight directory server.

Cognos Planning Contributor on VMware?

Contributor is the biggest problem when considering virtualisation, the reason for this is that in terms of the number of servers recommended for use with the product its the most likely target for VMware, simply in terms of the requirement for a Web Server, any number of Application Servers and a back-end Database Server or two, the sheer number of servers and rack space they would take instantly makes it a candidate for virtualisation. Not to mention the possibility of a front-end Citrix environment for client access if this is required by your organisation!

The trouble is that the Contributor product is an unusually powerful application that has been optimised to consume as much processing resource as you can throw at it, so the advantages that VMware typically offers in terms of improving server utilisation are not valid here. During job runs Contributor will by default consume 100% of the available CPU power available to it, the more servers or processors you give it, the more it will consume.

There is a positive side to this, the more servers you can provide, the quicker your jobs will complete, but in terms of virtualisation this is a bad thing as there are a few negative effects caused by this. Firstly, the Contributor application will appear sluggish when compared to native servers, and secondly it is possible that any other VM's running on the host server will be adversely affected.

The final problem you will encounter when running Cognos Planning within VMware is that it is not an officially supported platform by Cognos. By this we mean that any problems you may encounter when using the software will generally need to be reproduced outside of a VMware environment before you report them to Cognos to eliminate the possibility that the problem is VMware related.

Cognos Planning Development on VMware

Where VMware pretty much always comes in to its own is in development environments, the ability to quickly bring up clean server builds that have been stored away on a hard drive somewhere is a huge advantage, you get the server operating system, database server and applications all installed and configured just the way you need them, archive the virtual machine off somewhere and start your development. Any time you need a clean set of servers again, you just dig out the archive and start again.

In these environments where performance is not a prime concern, the use of a virtualisation product is likely to be a winner.

 

*For more information see the Cognos Position Statement regarding Customer Use and Support of VMware