Cognos 11 infrastructure

[sdf]

I haven't gone through with the documentations yet.But for those who had already been,
I just want to know if there are any major changes on the deployment of Cognos?
Have the distribution of components changed?
Load balancing infra?
fail over?

i dont have the luxury of time as of the moment to go through the documentation that's why im relying on you guys :)
This would help me condition my mind for the future challenges i will be facing.

cheers!

[MFGF]

I haven't gone through with the documentations yet.But for those who had already been,
I just want to know if there are any major changes on the deployment of Cognos?
Have the distribution of components changed?
Load balancing infra?
fail over?

i dont have the luxury of time as of the moment to go through the documentation that's why im relying on you guys :)
This would help me condition my mind for the future challenges i will be facing.

cheers!

Hi,

Most of the underlying architecture is the same as in Cognos 10, so the basic principles of configuring multiple servers is the same. However, most installs of Cognos Analytics will stop using the CGI and ISAPI gateways. The new normal configuration uses the web server reverse proxy capability to route requests to the Cognos Analytics server. This allows the browser to connect to the web server using ports 80 or 443 (HTTPS) at the web server tier. If you are using Active Directory Single Signon without Kerberos this is the required configuration. The CGI and ISAPI web gateways are required if you are using Active Directory with Kerberos for Single Signon (SSO). The gateways are also required for third party portal integration.

There are some new components in the architecture that use REST services rather than SOAP services. This means load balancing is rather different than Cognos 10 with the web tier doing load balancing for the REST services and IBM Cognos code for SOAP services. It's worth looking this up in the documentation, as you'd need to understand how it works in detail.

Cheers!

MF.

Edited to fix incorrect HTTPS port number - MF.

[vetteheadracer]

also be aware that any JDBC files i.e. SQLJDBC41.jar or SQLJDBC42.jar need to be located under the new \drivers directory.

\Program Files\ibm\cognos\analytics\drivers

[vetteheadracer]

Hi,

Most of the underlying architecture is the same as in Cognos 10, so the basic principles of configuring multiple servers is the same. However, most installs of Cognos Analytics will stop using the CGI and ISAPI gateways. The new normal configuration uses the web server reverse proxy capability to route requests to the Cognos Analytics server. This allows the browser to connect to the web server using ports 80 or 433 (HTTPS) at the web server tier. If you are using Active Directory Single Signon without Kerberos this is the required configuration. The CGI and ISAPI web gateways are required if you are using Active Directory with Kerberos for Single Signon (SSO). The gateways are also required for third party portal integration.

There are some new components in the architecture that use REST services rather than SOAP services. This means load balancing is rather different than Cognos 10 with the web tier doing load balancing for the REST services and IBM Cognos code for SOAP services. It's worth looking this up in the documentation, as you'd need to understand how it works in detail.

Cheers!

MF.

Port 443 for https not port 433 :) meep

[MFGF]

Port 443 for https not port 433 :) meep

Ahh! Sorry!! I will fix the original post. Now you know why I'm a muppet :)

MF.

[vetteheadracer]

Ahh! Sorry!! I will fix the original post. Now you know why I'm a muppet :)

MF.

Hey at least you can spell Cognos, I managed to set the gateway config to Cognis and then couldn't understand why it failed to load the page.......having said that I changed it to Cognos and it still doesn't load I get a blank screen like others have. No error messages in any of the logs, tried doing the redirect change in iis. Don't know if the problem is because we use https: rather than http: .

[MFGF]

Hey at least you can spell Cognos, I managed to set the gateway config to Cognis and then couldn't understand why it failed to load the page.......having said that I changed it to Cognos and it still doesn't load I get a blank screen like others have. No error messages in any of the logs, tried doing the redirect change in iis. Don't know if the problem is because we use https: rather than http: .

If you look in C:\Program Files\IBM\cognos\analytics\zookeeper\conf\zoo.cfg, what are the server.1 and clientConnStrings entries set to be?

MF.

[sdf]

Just curious, are there lots of changes on the process of migration. By this, imean moving from Cog 10 to Cog analytics.
is there any utility tool developed for migration? would be great ..

[bi4business]

Hi SDF,

I am a Beta tester from Analytics, and had the same question.
When I had installed my first Cognos Analytics (custom install) I did a export from my Cognos 10.2.# content and imported this inside Cognos Analytics.
Every product did work without any manual change.
I believe there will be some issue, when you are going out-of-the-box, but that's the same when migrating from C8 to C10 or C10.1 to C10.2.

Personally I don't like migration tools, I want to control my migration.

BI4BUSINESS

[sdf]

Yeah, i heard complex reports from 10.2.# which actually involves using javascripts would be an issue. But not a real stopper, just need to recreate the javascripts in analytics since they will not be carried over after the migration. Im hoping this is true.

[MFGF]

Yeah, i heard complex reports from 10.2.# which actually involves using javascripts would be an issue. But not a real stopper, just need to recreate the javascripts in analytics since they will not be carried over after the migration. Im hoping this is true.

Not quite. All reports will move across as-is, and that includes any JavaScript you might have added. Reports brought across from 8/10 will automatically have the flag set to use the old, non-interactive viewer, and your JavaScript should continue to run as before. Any new reports you author will have the interactive viewer property set to Enable, and in this mode, any JavaScript you add will be ignored. You can easily change the property to use the old non-interactive viewer (and thus JavaScript) though.

MF.

[84gopi]

Hi,

Thanks for the information, I will look into those things.

can you also let me know how can we handle load balancing in Cognos analytics if we have only 1 server, where all the cognos components are installed.

For example: In cognos 11 web server is optional gateway. so all the requests will be directly send to dispatcher.

so can you suggest better cognos server architecture details, like how many server we should have, which can be feasible and better performance.

I am suggesting my client with 3 Tier Architecture.

1. Top layer GUI ( windows and Web bases components)
2. Tier -1 Web Server ( optional gateway in cognos analytics)
3. Tier -2  Application server
4. Tier -3 Data Tier ( content store and metric Store) along with data sources.

Is it fine to with above approach? if its gud how can we manager load balancing here.

Or we should go with 1 primary and secondary server (backup) for each content store, gateway and Dispatcher.

Please advise.

Thanks
Gopi

[MFGF]

Hi,

Thanks for the information, I will look into those things.

can you also let me know how can we handle load balancing in Cognos analytics if we have only 1 server, where all the cognos components are installed.

For example: In cognos 11 web server is optional gateway. so all the requests will be directly send to dispatcher.

so can you suggest better cognos server architecture details, like how many server we should have, which can be feasible and better performance.

I am suggesting my client with 3 Tier Architecture.

1. Top layer GUI ( windows and Web bases components)
2. Tier -1 Web Server ( optional gateway in cognos analytics)
3. Tier -2  Application server
4. Tier -3 Data Tier ( content store and metric Store) along with data sources.

Is it fine to with above approach? if its gud how can we manager load balancing here.

Or we should go with 1 primary and secondary server (backup) for each content store, gateway and Dispatcher.

Please advise.

Thanks
Gopi

Hi,

In the 3-tier architecture you have proposed above, every tier is performing a different workload, so there can be no load-balancing, as no two servers are doing the same thing. There will be no fail-over either - if any one of the three servers drops out, your architecture stops working (as there is no redundancy).

Does this post help any?

http://www.cognoise.com/index.php?topic=25699.0

Cheers!

MF.