DX NetOps

CA Spectrum Tuesday Tip by Widjaja Sangtoki, Principal Support Engineer, December 16, 2011

How to configure Backup Location server on OneClick server

Description: In Distributed SpectroSERVER (DSS) or Fault Tolerant (FT) environment you should configure Backup Location server on the OneClick server. This will avoid a situation that Spectrum users cannot access other Landscapes in DSS environment or secondary SpectroSERVER in FT environment when the Main Location server is down.

Solution:
To configure Backup Location server on the OneClick server when Spectrum OneClick home page is accessible

1. Log in to the Spectrum OneClick home page as a Spectrum Administrator.

2. Click Administration.
The Administration Pages menu appears.

3. Select SPECTRUM Configuration.
The CA Spectrum Configuration page appears.

4. Enter appropriate Backup Location server name and click the Save button. Please see figure 1 and figure 2 below. The following message appears.
“Successfully saved the settings to the context.xml file.”

5. Click Restart OneClick Server button to restart OneClick Server. When confirmation dialog is shown, click OK button. Please see figure 3 below.

If you cannot access Spectrum OneClick home page because the Main Location server is down and OneClick server has been restarted, you can modify $SPECROOT/tomcat/webapps/spectrum/META-INF/context.xml file directly.

1. Backup $SPECROOT/tomcat/webapps/spectrum/META-INF/context.xml before modification.

2. Open context.xml file using a text editor, key in backupLocServerName parameter value within Resource tag at the bottom and save. Please see figure 4 below.

3. Restart OneClick Server.

These instructions are just what I was looking for but I have a couple of questions. Since you can only have one active MLS at a time how do you tell the backup MLS server it is now the primary if you can't get into one click to make the configuration change?

Hi S.Dracker

Normally we configured OneClick Server's contex.xml before Spectrum is running in production. So both MLS and backup Location Server are registered into contex.xml this will make OneClick Server switches to backup Location Server to get the landscape map when MLS is down.

In case you didn't specify backup Location Server in OneClick Server's contex.xml, when MLS is down, if OneClick Server hasn't been restarted, it still remembers the landscape map and able to access SpectroSERVERs listed in the map. However, once you restarted OneClick Server while MLS is still down, OneClick Server will lose the landscape map and it doesn't have option to refer to anyother Location Server, thus SpectroSERVERs will not be accessible via the OneClick Server.

I hope that clears your doubts.