Thursday 12 March 2015

Separation of Installation and Configuration - InfoSphere Master Data Management Installation

Installation of InfoSphere Master Data Management involves two major steps:
1. Placing all the components required for configuring the Master Data Management instance in a given directory (after performing required checks)
2. Configuring the application server, database and other services based on properties provided by the user.

Starting with InfoSphere Master Data Managment version 11.3, there is an option provided to configure the MDM instance after installation.  This option is also known as Separation.  When Separation is used, features selected for installation and the properties provided by the user are stored in certain files.  Configuration of the instance is performed based on values read from these files.

To make use of this feature, the option Manually run the scripts to configure InfoSphere MDM components after installation has to be selected in the Install Configuration Review Panel.

Installation Manager UI Summary Panel

When silent install is used, the below property has to be set to true in the input file provided.

<data key="user.L2.separate.install.config,com.ibm.mdm.advanced" value="true" />

After the Installation is complete, a target Configure_MasterDataManagement has to be invoked from the <MDM_INSTALL_DIR>/mds/scripts.  Database and Application Passwords have to be provided to configure the instance.  

Invoking Configure_MasterDataManagement

Further details on Separation and its usage after adding or removing features to MDM (Modify) and Uninstall are explained in detail in Separating Configuration from Installation

Separation is easy to use, as it maintains the properties and requires minimal details when the target is invoked.  It is highly helpful to debug installation failures when there are minor errors in the values provided for configuration.  InfoSphere MDM installation provides logs at the <MDM_INSTALL_DIR>/logs folder, wherein the database and madconfig targets logs are available.  Logs created during installation are also available under a directory which is provided as the dataLocation property to the Installation Manager  There are sufficient checks available to ensure that an installation would not fail.  However, installation failures occur rarely.

When Separation is not enabled and an installation fails,  debug has to be done based on the files in the logs folder under <MDM_INSTALL_DIR> and the dataLocation parameter provided to the Installation Manager.  The issue has to debugged and the install has to be started from scratch.

When Separation is used, files required for configuring the instance are available in the <MDM_INSTALL_DIR>  Configuration of the instance (which includes creating virtual tables, physical tables, server configuration, installation of the native ear, eba, webs services, configuring security and configuring selected UIs) occurs when the target ./madconfig.sh Configure_MasterDataManagement is invoked.  When all the parameters provided are valid, the configuration proceeds smoothly and completes.  The targets being executed as part of the configuration and the logs generated are displayed on the console.  The log files generated during the configuration are available under <MDM_INSTALL_DIR>/logs/madconfig directory.  The entire log created during the target execution are also available in the same directory.

Assume that one of the parameters giving during installation is incorrect. Supposing an incorrect value is provided as the database schema name, the configuration will fail when an attempt is made to create the tables.  After the Virtual tables are created, a check is performed by the Configure_MasterDataManagement to ensure that the tables are present.  This check would fail and indicate the user about the absence of tables.  Although a failure occurred , all the files would remain in the <MDM_INSTALL_DIR>.  It becomes easy to figure out where the problem occurred due to the presence of log files.  Also, once the problem is figured out, it could be fixed in the properties file(s) that are present in the <MDM_INSTALL_DIR>/properties directory and the Configure_MasterDataManagement target can be invoked again to configure the instance.  Thereby, Separation of installation and configuration helps us save a lot of time. 

The target maintains details on the status of all features, whether a feature is configured, partially configured or not configured.  When a feature is not configured, and is part of the list of features to be available, the feature will be configured.  When a feature is partially configured (in general, a feature is partially configured when a failure occurs during its configuration), an uninstall of the feature is performed followed by the configuration.  Similarly, removal of configured features is performed for features that are not required (this case generally happens during a Modify or Uninstall).

The Uninstall_MDM target has to be invoked before performing an uninstall from the Installation Manager.  Also, it is possible to invoke Uninstall_MDM followed by Configure_MasterDataManagement in case of any necessity.  In case any additional requirements are identified after an installation and configuration, the above option could be used.

InfoSphere Reference Data Management can also be installed using Separation and the target Configure_ReferenceDataManagement can be used for the configuration.