I’m very excited to share that this post serves as an update to let this wonderful community know I’ve put out some content on learn.sas.com to help guide you through both Administration and Deployment on your SAS 9.4M9 Grid environments! There are five courses, which we’ll get into detail about over the course of this update post. These five courses make up two distinct learning paths, as the courses flow together but fork off between two underlying technologies. Without further ado... let's get into the update!
Course Structure Overview
I say learning paths, but any of these can be taken as a standalone course. The idea is that one could get a comprehensive view of SAS 9.4 Grid by following through with a whole learning path, but they stand as pieces of educational material on their own merit (without the need for supporting courses).
Regardless, I think it’s helpful to get a birds-eye view before we investigate what each course has to offer.
The Courses:
- SAS Grid Manager Overview
- Deploying SAS Grid Manager
- Deploying SAS Grid Manager for Platform
- Administering SAS Grid Manager
- Administering SAS Grid Manager for Platform
To get the whole comprehensive experience you’d go:
SAS Grid Manager Overview -> Deploying SAS Grid Manager -> Administering SAS Grid Manager
OR:
SAS Grid Manager Overview -> Deploying SAS Grid Manager for Platform -> Administering SAS Grid Manager for Platform
The “Overview” and “Deployment” courses are free in the deployment learning subscription... and the “Administration” courses are under the administration learning subscription.
Course: SAS Grid Manager Overview
This course is all about building foundational knowledge of SAS Grid and SAS Grid Manager for Platform. It covers topics such as: hardware considerations, networking considerations, storage considerations, SAS software components, and operating system support. You’ll also get an understanding of what SAS Grid Computing is, and what SAS Grid Manager does to make the grid computing approach possible. Unlike the other four courses, there is no hands-on lab for this course (it’s all e-learning video material).
Learn more and take the course at the following link:
Courses: Deploying SAS Grid Manager & Deploying SAS Grid Manager for Platform
These two courses follow the same general structure... guiding you through either a deployment of SAS Grid Manager or SAS Grid Manager for Platform, respectively. The main difference between the two is SAS Grid Manager topologies use SAS Workload Orchestrator to manage and run jobs, whereas SAS Grid Manager for Platform topologies use ‘The Platform Suite for SAS’ to communicate with an included third-party technology (IBM Spectrum LSF) to manage and run jobs. The deployment process itself is almost identical between the two, so pick whichever one you need to be more familiar with. When in doubt, I’d go with SAS Grid Manager (as it’s built on the SAS-native job scheduler)
In either of these courses, you’re learn about: deployment prerequisites, SAS 9.4 Grid deployment tiers and their installation, common post-deployment configuration tasks, and concepts such as load-balancing and clustering. These courses feature a hands-on lab environment where you run through your OWN installation and deployment on both a Windows client machine and the Linux server machines it communicates with. There is also e-learning video content to supplement the practices.
Learn more and take the courses at the following links:
Courses: Administering SAS Grid Manager & Administering SAS Grid Manager for Platform
I won’t go through the differences between SAS Workload Orchestrator and The Platform Suite for SAS here as I already did in the previous section (if you skipped it to check out the administration course overview, just give that part a read 😊). Much like with the deployment courses, the administration courses follow each other very closely and differ only in underlying technology and at a few select points during various configuration steps. The theory between the two is very similar, and a run through one course would have you prepared to perform most administration tasks in an environment that used the opposite topology.
The administration courses cover: jobs, hosts, queues, and other grid-job-centric configurations. Each course looks at monitoring and logging, especially for jobs submitted to grid nodes. Both feature segments on SAS clients and grid-enabled SAS code using SASGSUB, SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Data Integration Studio, and SAS Enterprise Miner. One of the underlying technologies behind a lot of grid-enabled SAS code is the SAS Code Analyze Procedure (SCAPROC) which you can read more about here: Unearthing Secrets Hidden Within Grid-Enabled Code.
The courses also cover failover, troubleshooting, and SAS workload optimization. Like with the deployment courses, the administration courses have e-learning videos and a hands-on environment with practices that run you through common administration & configuration tasks. These lab environments, unlike those in the deployment courses, come with SAS 9.4 M9 Grid Manager or Grid Manager for Platform pre-deployed... so you can get started and run through scenarios on a grid environment immediately.
Learn more and take the courses at the following links:
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