Installing SAS in silent or headless mode

[rower]

I have been a SAS user for a long time (as a statistician), but am now charged with deploying SAS. We will be deploying the BI Server/Fraud Framework for our current client. Because of their security measures we are only allowed to install through the command line (in BASH; RHEL 4.x if I remember correctly). They call this a "silent" install. Would this be an instance where SAS has pre-existing scripts to perform an install like this or is this something a SAS rep would have to be on site to assist in performing installation? Even once we get the servers (tiers) up and running we will have to be able to do silent installs with the various clients (EG, EM, etc) on other employees computers.

Any help you could provide would be greatly appriciated even if it's only pointing me in the right direction.

Thanks

Todd

[jag_SAS]

Todd,

SAS 9.3 will offer a headless mode for planned deployments on UNIX soon -  likely before the end of February 2012, however, that will probably be too late to meet your needs. For planned deployments you can run the SAS Deployment Wizard in quiet mode, but only if you have a predefined response file that contains answers to every question the wizard would ask. Hopefully folks on the list will offer their experiences creating this file. What I see most customers do is to work with their system admins and have X11 enabled long enough to run the deployment wizard with only the -record -responsefile /some-location/response.txt. This will create the response file without doing any deployment. Another option, which you alluded to, is to engage SAS professional services to create the file for you. 

If you'd like to learn more about the -record and -responsefile options refer to the SAS Deployment Wizard and Manager's Usage Guide,  http://support.sas.com/documentation/installcenter/en/ikdeploywizug/64204/PDF/default/user.pdf.

Jawna

[rower]

Jawna

Thank you for your help on the previous issue. I am still pouring through the documentation. I also have other more "basic" questions about deployment. They are specifically related to hardware needs. I/O type, I/O through put, CPU usage, memory usage, all that jazz. The company I work at has deployed this before with the help of SAS professional services for demonstration purposes, but the deployment/migration (I think it may have been a migration) did not go smoothly and because of server configuration problems most tasks run at about the pace they would if they were running on an Apple IIe. Luckily it was only a demo enviroment. We used one box and 3 VMs for each tier. For my purposes this is definitely a very real and very important deployment for a rather important client. Others in my organizations have tried contacting others in the company, but sometimes that process can be rather slow. And because of time constraints I need some decent turn around time on questions and issues at this point. I know have a general idea what we are thinking as far as deployment, but I would like to discuss either phone or via e-mail about some of the hardware specs needed for the Intelligence platform (the three tiers: Meta, App, and web servers). This will evolve into a full Fraud Framework deployment with all the fixings (SNA and all that stuff). Like I said this part of SAS is fairly new to me (even though I have used it for quite a while) and from the others I have talked to in the organization a fairly newer"ish" thing to them too. So I'm not 100% on the inner workings of the SAS server enviroment(s) as we plan to use them here. I have been pouring over the doumentation and most of it seems to be things about configuration files, what the Meta data server is, what the SAS App server is, etc. But at this moment I could use some hardware guidlines, how the servers will communicate (SSL/TLS?), etc. Any help or direction you can point me in would be greatly appriciated