Administering your SAS Grid Manager for Platform environment
A number of posts have been published by GEL recently highlighting changes to SAS Grid Manager in 9.4 M6, with a focus on the new SAS-developed provider architecture, consisting of SAS Workload Orchestrator and SAS Job Flow Scheduler. In this post, we'll look instead at the SAS Grid Manager for Platform offering, which uses the familiar Process Manager and LSF software for grid orchestration, scheduling and execution. We'll also introduce a new administration interface, purpose-built for managing the SAS Grid Manager for Platform environment.
Background
Before the release of M6 in 18w47, Platform Suite for SAS, consisting of Process Manager and LSF, served as the default provider software for SAS Grid. With M6 came a number of changes to the packaging of the grid offerings. The product named SAS Grid Manager is the new default option, with the SAS-developed provider technology. The SAS Grid Manager for Platform product is now what was previously known as SAS Grid Manager, bundled with Platform Suite for SAS as the provider. The less common SAS Grid Manager for Hadoop product remains the same. This slide from Mark Schneider provides a good visual summary of the options on offer.
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Upgrade Paths
Aside from getting the latest functionality and security fixes that come with M6, upgrading also overcomes challenges related to Flash/Flex end of life. In an earlier post, I highlighted some of the upgrade paths available for Grid customers, but heres a quick summary:
- New Grid customers should deploy SAS Grid Manager (with SAS Workload Orchestrator and Job Flow Scheduler)
- Existing Grid customers running Platform Suite cannot switch to SAS Grid Manager. They can either upgrade the whole platform (SAS & Platform Suite) to SAS Grid Manager for Platform at M6, or upgrade SAS to 9.4 M6 but remain on their existing version of Platform Suite.
What about upgrading LSF in isolation? Remember that LSF 9.x reaches end-of-life in April 2020. Well, R&D are exploring some options for affected sites, including the possibility of upgrading LSF without upgrading SAS - this is subject to testing and validation efforts from R&D to verify supported version combinations.
SAS Grid Manager for Platform module for SAS Environment Manager
Now that all that's out of the way, let's take a look at one of the new features that come with SAS Grid Manager for Platform. In fact, it's one of the only changes; pretty much everything else remains the same as it was prior to M6, so the transition for end users is relatively seamless. Grid administrators, however, have a slick new interface to use for grid management.
The SAS Grid Manager module for SAS Environment Manager was first introduced in M3 with Platform Web Services, and features have been added over subsequent releases. In M6, the application was rebuilt from scratch. The name of the module has been revised to reflect the new offering name (SAS Grid Manager for Platform module for SAS Environment Manager), but it has functional parity with the earlier version. It is not to be confused with the SAS Grid Manager for Platform Agent plug-in for SAS Enviroment Manager, which provides the facility for monitoring the grid from within Environment Manager. The Grid Manager module is now entirely an HTML5 interface with a SAS Viya look and feel. If you've been keeping up, you'll notice the interface looks similar to the SAS Workload Orchestrator web interface included with SAS Grid Manager.
The module is accessible from SAS Environment Manager via the Administration side menu, or directly via the URL (http://[SAS-Web-Server]:7980/SASGridManager). If accessing from Environment Manager, users must be a member of the Management Console: Advanced role or the Management Console: Content Management roles in metadata.
Non-admin users can view grid jobs they have submitted, as well information about queues and hosts in the grid. Grid administrators can view (and control) jobs from any user, as well as view audit logs, manage LSF configuration settings, configure and monitor high-availability services, and renew the grid license. Service restarts are only necessary after license renewal, but a handy new feature is the ability to restart LSF daemons directly from the interface after updating the license.
All other configuration changes take effect immediately. Changes made in the module will update LSF configuration information stored in the PWS tables in Web Infrastructure Data Server.
Configuration information is updated both in the LSF configuration files on disk (e.g. lsb.hosts) as well as in the Platform Web Services database. PWS also performs reconfiguration commands such as lsadmin reconfig and badmin mbdrestart in the background when a new configuration is applied. The configuration files display the default configuration lines commented out, with the prefix #PWS#, as shown below.
Changes made manually in configuration files will not automatically be synchronised with SAS, unless a configuration is loaded from the module's LSF Configuration page.
Platform RTM for SAS
What about Platform RTM? The new module provides many of the same functions offered by Platform RTM, but as before, administrators can choose to use RTM for SAS to monitor and manage the grid. RTM reads from and writes to LSF configuration files using the root account, preventing the SAS installation account from modifying them. For this reason, if changes to the grid configuration are made using RTM, any subsequent changes must also be made using RTM - it is not easily possible to alternate between RTM and the Grid Manager module wihtout modifying the ownership on the configuration files.
More Information
My sincere thanks to Greg Wootton for his contributions to this post and assistance in explaining what happens behind the scenes.
For further information, please refer to the official grid documentation.
Thank you for reading. I hope the information provided in this post has been helpful. Please feel free to comment below to share your own experiences.
