Decommission of LASR servers

[tsaop]

HI, good day,

We had installed SAS BI 9.4 with following architecture: 1 DM Advanced (compute tier 1), 3 Metadata servers (metadata tier), 3 Web servers (mid-tier), 1 VA Node 1 (compute tier 2) , and 7 LASR servers (node 2 to node 😎 linked to VA Node 1.  Total of 15 machines.  

Due to lack of activities and storage considerations, we are considering to remove partial servers from service. Target servers to be removed are VA Node 1 and all 7 LASR servers.  Total of 8 machines. Not sure about 3 Web servers? DM Advanced and Metadata servers are active servers.

What is the proper way to decommission of partial service? Can we just turn off servers/machine, or do I have to go thru required steps to do the following: backup, stop servers, remove configurations, remove servers, etc? Main product to be removed is SAS Virtual Analytics.

What is the consequence to remaining servers? Any prior knowledge you can share with?

Any suggestions or comments are welcomed and appreciated.

tsaop@CA

[SASKiwi]

I can definitely confirm that you can't just switch off the SAS VA servers and expect the remaining servers to function without any problems. You will need to reconfigure your SAS software on both your metadata and mid-tier servers removing references to SAS VA and the associated servers. You will need a new server install plan from SAS to correctly configure your new architecture.

In short this is not a simple task and I would expect it would take several days to implement. 

[tsaop]

Hi, SASKiwi,

Thanks for your inputs.

Turn off SAS VA and LASR servers is out of question.

How do we re-configure on both metadata servers and mid-tier servers? Any SAS installation note related to this question you can share with?

If we convert from SAS BI (15 machines) to generic SAS (7 machines), we need new install plan from SAS? How does that work?

Thanks

tsaop@CA

[JuanS_OCS]

Hello @tsaop,

I wonder: have you be involved on the initial installation/deployment of the current environment.

It looks to have a certain complexity, and I would definetely advise you to get a SAS Consultant or prefered SAS partner to support you with a proper decomission of the servers.

[tsaop]

Indeed, initial installation was done by SAS tech support onsite and took more than a week.
Thanks for all your inputs.
tsaop@CA