SAS VA + Office Analytics Deployment Questions

[ShaneD]

Hello, I recently deployed SAS Office Analytics(OA) with the 4 server deployment plan.  I have that up and running and now wish to begin my SAS VA deployment.  When looking at the two machine deployment plan, I see a lot of the components listed that I already have in my 4 server OA deployment.  I do want these two products to share the same base infrastructure. 

What are the minimum software/components I need to install/configure for the VA server deployment to use the metadata, middle tier, ect. from my OA deployment?  Is that possible?

Do I just install/deploy everything in the plan, but then specify my OA servers when going through the configuration?

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks!

[SASKiwi]

SAS Office Analytics and VA installs on separate servers are quite independent of each other and so need to each contain a complete set of software, a lot of which will common to both.

Start from scratch with your VA install - you need to do this anyway so you can apply upgrades and maintenance independently on the two installations.

[michele_sas]

Hi Shane,

You asked if it is possible to have your SAS Visual Analytics deployment use the metadata server, middle tier of your SAS Office Analytics deployment.  This is possible only if both SAS Visual Analytics and SAS Office Analytics are deployed with a software order and a custom plan file that includes both SAS Office Analytics and SAS Visual Analytics.  

I recommend that you open a track with SAS Technical Support.

[SASKiwi · Accepted solution]

While it is technically feasible to share servers between SAS OA and VA as @michele_sas says, I would personally advise that you don't. Most SAS install specialists I know would advise the same.

The main reasons for this are:

• the upgrade schedules for OA and VA are different, so you could well find you want to upgrade VA but not OA or vice versa. If they are combined you don't have a choice and all servers will be down while you do your upgrade instead of only one set of servers. Usually OA is the more important - it is with us and it has been great to keep that going while VA is upgraded.
• resource usage on OA is a lot different to VA - you may find one impacts the other. Your SAS mid-tier for VA uses a lot of resources and should be closely monitored for optimal performance. For OA it is less important.
• troubleshooting becomes harder because a combined environment is more complicated to diagnose problems

[JuanS_OCS]

Hello @ShaneD,

I would strongly go with the recommendation by @michele_sas and contact SAS Technical Support.

The integration is possible, however you need some detailed guidance, first to evaluate what do you have installed, and on which versions. And your licenses.

If you make an integration, it is much better for all products to be part of a same SOA/Depot, and to create a single deployment plan out of it. Then, you would need to update configurations and deploy the new software.

Have in mind some considerations, though:

- SAS Visual Analytics version cycles are (or were) very short, so new versions do release very quickly, which do not happend with many other products. This means, if you make such an integration, you cannot update SAS VA anymore as soon as it releases because you need to update everything at same time.

- Do you have already a deployment plan including OA and VA?

- Do yu have VA and OA on same maintenance level? You will need them to

- As @SASKiwi mentioned, it is a good idea to separate SAS VA processes (only load pre-prepared data and show reports) and have another server to do data transformations and queries. Not only for performance, but stability as well. VA requires all the memory. AS soon as another session comes, it can overload RAM and virtual memory and kill a server.

a) the best recommendation is to have 2 different physical/virtual servers for the compute bits.

b) a middle-ground is to have a SASApp for VA, having high MEMSIZE values but in control, not MEMSIZE 0, and another SASApp (say, SASAppOA) with normal BI ETL MEMSIZE values. Then you can be in control of how much memory each SAS process requires.

Hope it helps,

Kind regards,

Juan