topic Re: Starting a SAS VA 7.4 LASR Server with a Program in Administration and Deployment

Starting a SAS VA 7.4 LASR Server with a Program

SASKiwi — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 23:22:12 GMT

My requirement is to have a SAS program that will start the SAS VA 7.4 LASR servers after a server restart. Our SAS VA LASR servers (running on Windows 2012 R2) are rebooted monthly as part of standard server maintenance. While the reboot starts all SAS services automatically, the VA LASR servers don't start automatically and I'm not aware of any configuration option to make this happen.

So I've been investigating a programmatic solution. I've found that the following LIBNAME statement will restart a LASR server but as soon as the LIBNAME is cleared the LASR server stops. How do I ensure that the LASR server(s) keep running?

* STARTSERVER option starts the LASR server.;
libname VALIBLA SASIOLA startserver = (path = "\\sasservername\sas$\SAS\Config\Lev1\AppData\SASVisualAnalytics\VisualAnalyticsAdministrator\sigfiles")    
  host = "sasservername.com" port = 10011 tag = HPS  
  signer = "https://sasservername.com:443/SASLASRAuthorization"
  ;

Re: Starting a SAS VA 7.4 LASR Server with a Program

PaulHomes — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 23:43:26 GMT

Have you seen this SAS blog post by Gilles Chrzaszcz? How LASR servers are started from SAS Visual Analytics Administrator

Being on Windows yours is a non-distributed VA right? There's some sample code at the end of the post which uses proc vasmp serverwait after the libname statement to keep the server running.

Re: Starting a SAS VA 7.4 LASR Server with a Program

SASKiwi — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 00:28:12 GMT

@PaulHomes - thanks for pointing out that blog post. It's very useful.

I actually have tried the recommended code:

/* Keep the SAS session up until SERVERTERM received */
proc vasmp;
   serverwait  port=10013;
quit;

But what I found is the program pauses and never completes when it runs the SERVERWAIT statement and this happens regardless of whether this code runs in a batch job or not. If you kill the batch job or stop the session running the SERVERWAIT statement then the LASR server stops too. My question is, how can I keep the LASR server running without the SERVERWAIT statement continuously running?

The documentation appears to be consistent with the behaviour I'm seeing - that SERVERWAIT suspends execution of the VASMP procedure:

http://documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=inmsref&docsetVersion=2.81&docsetTarget=p1hkpwre0o94mcn1b13ps3vi24ts.htm&locale=en

Re: Starting a SAS VA 7.4 LASR Server with a Program

PaulHomes — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 01:05:49 GMT

Isn't that just the way it works with non-distributed VA? The process you use to launch the server will block until someone shuts that server down. It could be a batch program launched in the background so it doesn't lock up an interactive session (DMS, EG, etc). If that's not preferred, have you looked into the alternative autoload option?

Re: Starting a SAS VA 7.4 LASR Server with a Program

SASKiwi — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 01:16:21 GMT

@PaulHomes - Yes, it appears that is by design. I guess the batch job starting the LASR server can just keep running. I just wanted to check in case there was something I had missed. ATM AUTOLOAD is disabled as we prefer to load on demand, so we will probably go with the program solution.