Planning 8.4.0 Environment Recomendations

[dylan-nyc]

Hello,

We have a current Production environment of Cognos Planning and BI 8.4.0 and are looking to add some more capacity as we have run into a few issues with the Planning Web Service tipping over and maybe a few Content Store issues as well.  I was wondering if anyone could offer their thoughts on what might the top 2 or 3 changes that might improve performance.  Here is what we server by server:

-2 virtual webs 1CPU 1GB RAM
-1 Physical "Everything Box" (LDAP, Access Manager, Primary Content Manager, All Cognos Services but Planning Web (2 threads for Planning Jobs)
-1 Physical Planning Job, Web Service, Dispatcher 4xQuad 40GB RAM (12 threads designated for Jobs)
-1 Physical BI and backup Content Manager 2xQuad 16GB RAM

Some ideas would be to:
-Put the Primary Content Manager on another server (we have an old 4 CPU 4GB RAM box)
-Add another server to do Planning Web and Planning Admin Console and turn off those services on the other boxes
-Take BI off the "Everything Box"

Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Dylan

[ericlfg]

Hey Dylan,

How do you know that your PWS is tipping over?  I'm going to assume you've configured some perfmon counters on the epPlanningService8.exe and kept an eye on the logging for the bytes native and bytes native peak? 

Generally as a good practice the CM should be on it's own machine, especially when there are a large number of processors capable of running planning jobs (reconciles, publishes, etc) along with a lot of concurrent end user / administrative users using the system.  When jobs spin up, they authenticate against the CM for each item it handles, so coupled with end user authentication requests, etc it can slow things down.

Presently, it looks like you have one machine handling the PWS and this is also your primary job server.  You may want to consider splitting this up.  I would probably recommend that your 'everything' box can be used as the PWS and other non-intensive services, like presentation, if you move the CM off to it's own machine and remove BI.  However, depending on your report requirements, an additional machine may be required to satisfy BI or testing can be performed with BI still in place.

These would be my recommendations, and obviously testing should always take place.  Cognos support may also have some tweaks you can implement or other suggestions.