SAS clients on Apple Mac?

[AndrewHowell]

Platform: SAS 9.4 running on Linux servers

What options are there for running SAS client software on Apple Macs?

• SAS Management Console can be run from an XTERM session from on the Linux server. (Actually runs pretty nicely..)
• What about other Java clients (DI Studio in particular, etc)? I can't find a Linux version of the DI client on the server, but is the source there to compile one?
• Enterprise Guide (.Net) won't work, I presume?

The only other alternative I see is to set up a Windows "jump box" for users to connect to in order to run the SAS clients, but would appreciate other people's experience, suggestions?

[nhvdwalt]

Hi @AndrewHowell

What about Parallels Desktop for Mac ?

https://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/

[SimonDawson]

My daily driver laptop is running Linux so I've got a similar conundrum. I wouldn't say I'm a SAS user though so keep that in mind when you consider my experiences. To help users debug issues I don't often need to actually use the clients. On the odd occasion I need to test a small bit of SAS code I'll ssh to a box with SAS installed on it then run SAS on the command line with sas -nodms and from there I copy/paste code snippets into my terminal from my text editor on my desktop. I use the SAS Management Console by SSH'ing to a box and running sasmc with X11 forwarding setup. If I'm writing a bit of code that is a bit more involved I'll login to SASStudio and interact with my code with my web browser. For the infrequent time I need to use a thick client I have various virtual machines running Windows with the clients on it. This setup is fine for me, I'm happy to seutp/install and support my own vms for this purpose. If this is going to be a large scale deployment of Macs you are going to need to support for users then Citrix might be something to consider, this would make patching the clients much simpler. A terminal server would fill the same function too. I use Citrix on my Linux workspace  for an application I spend a significant amount of my time in and it works well.

[AndrewHowell]

Thanks @SimonDawson - was aware of those options, I'm just seeing what others have tried to do on Macs. SASMC can run via X, can the other Java-based clients?

[SimonDawson · Accepted solution]

The only Java based SAS client supported on anything other than Windows is SAS Management Console. All the other clients (DIStudio, InfoMapStudio, Forecast Studio, Enterprise Miner, etc.) are only supported on Windows. There is no X for Windows for your Xserver on OSX to connect to if you were to run the clients on Windows. The other gotcha with even SAS Management Console is the options to sign in with IWA is only available when SAS Management Console is launched on Windows. This can be a show stopper in places where things like smartcards are used for authentication.

I'd say that Java webstart for EM and Forecast Server might work but they wouldn't be supported by tech support.

SAS Enterprise Miner JWS on Linux

Tried it out, I was able to login. If it breaks don't raise any tracks 🙂

Another obviously not supported thing to do is to mangle files in a depot until the SDW installs a package on an unsupported operating system. Many years ago I did just that thought I took a SAS 9.2 depot and mangled it to a point where the SDW was tricked into installing SAS Data Integration Studio on an Ubuntu desktop machine. DIStudio would launch, I was able to logon but it was very very sketchy. I didn't manage to do anything useful with it. It was very unstable so I ditched it pretty quickly.

[AndrewHowell]

@SimonDawson - thanks for the comprehensive response.

Any reason why only SAS Management Console, and not the other Java clients (esp DI Studio)?

[SimonDawson]

Can't say definitively but I can only imagine it's customer demand vs. effort to support more platforms.

[AndrewHowell]

@SimonDawson - thanks, figured that may be the answer.

I had hoped for either:

• ALL Java clients to be able to be run from X, or;
• At the vary least, the Java source was included in the deployment to able to compile if required.

Oh well.

[ronan]

For thick clients Virtualisation (Edit : or X11 emulation) is almost mandatory, as @nhvdwalt & @SimonDawson have observed.

If you are dealing with statisticians, then there is JMP statistical exploratory software (from SAS Institute also) which has a mac OS version 

   https://www.jmp.com/en_us/support/system-requirements.html#macintosh

   To the best of my knowledge, this is the only SAS enabled software natively running on MacOS

For thin clients, however, SAS Studio is supported on Safari browser as well as Google Chrome, MS IE Firefox.

https://support.sas.com/documentation/installcenter/en/ikstudiosr/71304/PDF/default/sreq.pdf

A product like SAS Office Analytics includes SAS Studio (MidTier edition).

Another option as regards thin clients, would be Jupyter 

https://blogs.sas.com/content/sasdummy/2017/04/08/python-to-sas-saspy/

I am not sure SAS provides the same level of support in this case, though. 

[AndrewHowell]

@ronan - yes, concur thick clients require X. I'm looking for the next extension of that to clarify what SAS Java client apps can/can't be run on MacOS using X.

SAS Management Console is available to launch: $SASHOME/SASManagementConsole/9.4/sasmc (I use it often.)

What about running the other Java client apps (SAS Data Integration Studio, in particular) on MacOS using X?

For example, I can't find an equivalent distudio executable in the $SASHOME folder - does this mean is just has to be compiled, can it be compiled, or is there a critical reason it's not there which would render my search futile?

[ronan]

Also, I forgot to mention another Web client available to MacOS : *SAS Environment Manager Administration console*. This emulates the following SMC plug-ins
- Folder manager
- Library Manager
- Server Manager (partially, it seems)
- User Manager

See https://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/evadmug/68379/HTML/default/viewer.htm#home.htm

[ChrisNZ]

Just for the sake of completeness, and to go down memory lane:

If you have a PowerPC mac, and if IT allows on the network, and if you can get hold of a licence, then you can use SAS 6.12 as a native (non-Carbon-compliant) application. I'd imagine that you can remote submit code to a SAS 9.4 server via SAS/Connect.  

The whole setup would probably be much slower and much more limited than any VM running a recent version on recent hardware.