HP Availability Manager Version 2.4 Release Notes The following notes address late-breaking information and known problems for the HP Availability Manager Version 2.4. These notes fall into the following categories: o Installation note o New and changed features o Problems corrected o Operation notes o Display notes 1 Installation Note: Uninstall Prior Versions Before Installing the New Kit On both Windows and OpenVMS systems, you must uninstall prior versions of the Availability Manager before installing Version 2.4: o On Windows systems, you must uninstall Versions 2.3 and lower. o On OpenVMS systems, you must uninstall all previous versions. These requirements are explained in the Version 2.4 installation instructions. Prior to installation, you might want to make a copy of your AVAILMAN.INI file as a reminder of the names of the groups you usually monitor. Also, delete any desktop shortcuts for previous versions of the Availability Manager because they will be invalid with the new version. 2 New and Changed Features The following sections discuss new and changed features introduced in Version 2.4 of the Availability Manager. 1 2.1 User Privileges Required to Access Application When you invoke the Availability Manager, the application tests for the required OPER and SYSPRV privileges. If it cannot set these privileges, the application displays the following error message: %AMDS-F-NOPRIV, insufficient privilege -AMDS-E-REQPRIV, Availability Manager requires OPER and SYSPRV to run In all situations, the application resets users' privileges to their original state when you exit the program. 2.2 Password Encryption on OpenVMS Nodes On OpenVMS nodes with Version 2.4 installed, the Availability Manager checks to see whether the node you are logging onto accepts encrypted passwords. If the node can accept them, encrypted passwords are passed to it. 2.3 Event Threshold Maximum Values Increased Maximum values for integer value thresholds have been increased where appropriate. For example, the event for direct I/O, HIDIOR, has been increased from 1000 to over 1 billion (1G). 2.4 New DECW$ Resource Names in Default Filter List New DECW$ client and server resource names used by Motif Version 1.3 have been added to the default filter list for the default lock contention filter. 2.5 Posting of LOVOTE and LOVLSP Events LOVOTE and LOVLSP events are posted for every node in the cluster rather than once per cluster. This is considered to be a new feature because this behavior differs from DECamds, which reports only one event per cluster. The change in behavior is because, in the Availability Manager, you can configure events to have different thresholds on each node. 2 2.6 Ability to Customize at the Group Level Beginning in Version 2.4, you can make customizations at the group level. To do this, right-click a group name in the Application Window, and select "Customize..." on the drop-down menu. The Availability Manager next displays a Customization page containing a number of tabs. You can select the tab that corresponds to the type of customization you want to perform. Refer to Section 2.7 for an explanation of the effect of customizations you make at the group level. 2.7 Levels of Configuration The Availability Manager provides a powerful feature that makes configuration easier and more flexible. This system is hierarchical and features five levels of configuration. These levels are explained in detail in the Customization Chapter in the Availability Manager User's Manual, Version 2.4. To make this feature more readily apparent, a two-line status box now appears at the bottom of the Customization page. The first line tells you the level at which a selected parameter will be customized if you change its value. The second line less you what level the value will come from if you press the "Use default value" button. 2.8 Ability to Customize Nodes in Any State Beginning in Version 2.4, you can customize nodes in any state, that is, nodes displayed in any color in the Application Window. To customize a node, right-click the node name in the Node Pane, and select "Customize." Then select the tab corresponding to the type of customization you want to perform. 2.9 New Columns in Node Pane The Node Pane in the Application Window now displays the following new columns: o Active CPUs This column displays the number of active CPUs over the number of CPUs in the potential set of CPUs. o Process Count column 3 This column indicates the actual count of processes over the maximum number of processes. The proportion of the actual count to the maximum count of processes is displayed as a percentage. Whenever the proportion of the active process count to the maximum allowed process count exceeds a threshold, a HIPRCT event is signaled. You can customize this threshold percentage along with all other threshold settings. 2.10 Ability to Set a Value to Make Nodes Appear More Quickly The minimum value you can set in the AMDS$LOGICALS.COM file for the amount of time between hello packets has been decreased from 15 to 5 seconds. Entering a lower value means that Availability Manager nodes will be displayed more quickly. The values appear in the AMDS$LOGICALS.COM file as follows: $ AMDS$DEF AMDS$RM_DEFAULT_INTERVAL 30 ! Default of 30 seconds $ AMDS$DEF AMDS$RM_SECONDARY_INTERVAL 90 ! Default of 90 seconds For more information, refer to the comments in the AMDS$LOGICALS.COM file. 3 Problems Corrected The following sections discuss problems corrected in Version 2.4 of the Availability Manager. 3.1 Incorrect NOPROC Event Message Displayed In previous versions, when the network or the graphical user interface was very busy, the Availability Manager sometimes incorrectly displayed a NOPROC event message for each process that the application was watching on a node. (NOPROC indicates that a process that was present is no longer there.) About five seconds after this message was displayed, the events were cancelled, and PRCFND event messages were displayed for each process that the application was watching. (PRCFND indicates that a process that was not present is now present.) This problem as been corrected in Version 2.4. 4 3.2 Installation of Availability Manager Removes DECamds Console Image When installing the Availability Manager Data Analyzer kit on a node, you are prompted to remove prior versions of the Availability Manager. If DECamds is also installed on the node, removing the previous version of Availability Manager might cause DECamds to become inoperable. If this problem occurs, running DECamds results in the display of the following message: %DCL-W-ACTIMAGE, error activating image amds$system:amds$console -CLI-E-IMGNAME, image file AMDS$SYSTEM:[SYSEXE]AMDS$CONSOLE.EXE; -RMS-F-DEV, error in device name or inappropriate device type for operation In this situation, the workaround is to reinstall DECamds. This problem has been resolved in the Availability Manager Data Analyzer Version 2.4 kit and in the DECamds Version 7.3-2A kit. 3.3 Error Message in Port Data Display on Cluster Members Pane In versions of OpenVMS prior to Version 7.3-2, clicking the handle in front of Ports in the Cluster Members pane sometimes results in the display of the following error message instead of the port information: ?? Error retrieving Circuit data, error code=0x7 (No room in response buffer) This was a problem related to gathering circuit data on OpenVMS that was corrected in OpenVMS Version 7.3-2. 4 Operation Notes The following sections contain notes pertaining to the operation of the Availability Manager Version 2.4. 4.1 Administrator Account Required On Windows 2000 and Windows XP platforms, the Data Analyzer must be run from an account in the Administrator group. This restriction will be removed in a future release of the Availability Manager. 5 4.2 Problem Displaying Large Numbers of Processes or Disks Very busy networks can sometimes interfere with the transfer of data between the Data Analyzer and the Data Collector. This problem is noticeable when you display large numbers of disks or processes. The number of disks or processes might change temporarily because of a lost data message. This problem will be corrected in a future release. 4.3 Event Reporting Problem Version 2.4 of the Availability Manager contains the following unimplemented threshold event: LOSTVC. 5 Display Notes The following sections contain display notes pertaining to the Data Analyzer. 5.1 Problems Using the Data Analyzer on All Platforms The following sections contain notes about the display of the Data Analyzer on Windows and OpenVMS platforms. 5.1.1 Events Sometimes Displayed After Background Collection Stops The Data Analyzer sometimes displays events after users customize their systems to stop collecting a particular kind of data. This is most likely to occur when the Data Analyzer is monitoring many nodes. Under these conditions, a data handler sometimes clears events before all pending packets have been processed. The events based on the data in these packets are displayed even though users have requested that this data not be collected. 5.1.2 Truncated LAN Channel Summary Display On versions of OpenVMS prior to Version 7.3-1, the LAN Channel Summary display might be disabled for some OpenVMS nodes if there are more than seven channels for that virtual circuit. This problem results from a restriction in the OpenVMS Version 7.3 PEDRIVER. For this condition, the following error message is displayed: Error retrieving ChSumLAN data, error code=0x85 (Continuation data disallowed for request) 6 This problem was corrected in the OpenVMS Version 7.3-1 PEDRIVER. 5.2 Problem Using the Data Analyzer on OpenVMS Systems: Long Runs Exhaust XLIB Resource ID On older versions of DECwindows Motif, a resource ID allocation scheme works poorly with the Motif support in Java for OpenVMS. As a result, long-running Availability Manager sessions might stop updating the display at a time that depends on the speed of the OpenVMS machine. For example, a session running on a dual-processor 275 MHz system reported the following after 14 hours: Xlib: resource ID allocation space exhausted! On faster machines, this message was reported after only 8 hours. This problem appears to have been corrected in DECwindows Motif Version 1.3-1. 7