AMDS and Availability Manager

[Piet Timmers]

Hi everybody,

Can someone explain we: what is the difference between AMDS en Availability Manager.

Thanks.

Piet

[labadie_1 · Accepted solution]

Amds is the "old" product and will be progressively abandoned. Availability Manager is the product which will be updated.

Amds installation adds a verb to the Dcltables:
$ avail/motif
or
$ avail/interface=decwindows

With Availability manager, you do not have this verb, as you install a part on NT (or W2K) and you click there.

You should stick with Availability manager, unless you do not have a NT with an X display available.

You have a very good presentation at
vmsone.com/~vmsonepages/dfwdays/Presentations/Kierstein.ppt

[Ian Miller.]

Availability Mgr is the follow on product from AMDS. It runs on VMS and Windoze platforms and usese java. It needs more memory and CPU than AMDS. Current versions of Availability Mgr have caught up with AMDS in terms of functionality.

[Ian Miller.]

See
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/availman/index.html
for more info.

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

To Quote from the AM documenatation:

"The Availability Manager tool evolved from the OpenVMS-only DECamds product and its Motif graphical user interface (GUI). Because the Availability Manager Data Analyzer requires a Java run-time environment, it does not run on OpenVMS VAX, which does not support Java."

An yes it does run on Alpha. One point of annoyance, AM insists on installing its own copy of the JRE independet on what you have already on your system...

Greetings, Martin

[EDER MEDEIROS VICENTE J]

Hello,

The AM product will eventually replace DECamds. The initial rewrite was part of the system management policy to try and have OpenVMS system management tools work on OpenVMS and Windows, since an OpenVMS system manager may have one or the other available, but not both.
As far as AM packaging its own JRE to run against, it didn't used to. So, when the system manager changed versions of Java on their machine, AM broke. Most of the time, going from one version of Java to another involves some porting. So, AM now provides its own runtime environment so it will always work, and the system manager is free to install whatever version of Java he/she desires.
Hope this helps.

Barry Kierstein
AM Project Lead

[Ian Miller.]

Thank you "Barry Kierstein AM Project Lead"
A helpful statement from a person you knows. Any chance of speeding it up? It's still appears slow compared to AMDS when running on a alphastation thats not exactly leading edge (alphastation 400 4/233 :-)

[Willem Grooters]

Ian:

IMHO There's just ONE proper way to speed it up: it should be running in NATIVE mode - so NOT in Java....

Willem

[EDER MEDEIROS VICENTE J]

All,

Hmmm... I am not sure how I became Eder, anybody know? I just signed up for this forum yesterday...
Anyway, speeding up AM on OpenVMS. The biggest thing now is to give it the memory it needs. If it is always garbage-collecting, this slows down the GUI tremendously, creating pauses in responding to data updates, mouse clicks, etc. If you are seeing pauses, then look into the part of the installation notes dealing with performance considerations for help in this area. The GUI, when given enough memory, will be a bit slow, but consistent.
Now, for the rest of the speedup. Java is slower. Why then Java? Well, keeping sources going for both Windows and OpenVMS is very low. The code differences to accomodate both platforms is about 2 pages of Java code, and about 6 pages of C code for native routines. If the rewrite had been done in C, then one would have to work more closely with the operating system, graphics, etc., and more time taken to these details rather than features and enhancements.
Once the port to Itanium is finished, etc. the team here will be looking at performance. There are some indications that things can improve with some study, but with porting to Itanium, needing mature Java performance analyzers, etc., this hasn't been done yet. With this will come some more up to date recommendations on memory settings, etc.

Barry

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello Barry,

sorry, am I the only one who thinks the state of software development is ridiculous if an upgrade of the Java enviroment breaks the application? If anybody would tell me that I do have to ship the C-RTL to every customer and install it in a separate tree since if they had a newer one the program would not run, I would declare that person nuts. But for Java this just is accepted as "normal". In which direction is IT moving here?

Greetings, Martin

[Keith Parris]

Barry, I've submitted a request to the ITRC folks to help you with your identity crisis.

[Rob Buxton]

Martin,
Yep, the JRE updates are a real pain irrespective of the environment. There are differences between JRE 1.3 and 1.4 that break applications written using the earlier one. Hmmm backwards compatibility eh?

Thankfully you can have multiple JREs installed on your workstation.

As regards AM, there's one issue, it seems to be network sensitive. I've never fully got to thebottom of it as I'm the only VMS admin here and increasinly have less and less VMS stuff to do.

HP, on a number of products,are moving away from JRE's, the new Insight Manager still uses a JRE but the statements being made are that it is gradually being removed.

[Mitchell Bell]

Have you found where to download the latest software?

[Ian Miller.]

Mitchell,
what do you mean download the latest software?

The current release AM V2.3-1 is available from
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/availman/

and V2.4 will be arriving real soon now.

[Dave Pierce]

I am not sure if this should be a new thread, but are there any issues with running mixed versions of AMDS on the same cluster, with different system disks. The VMS 7.3-1 to 7.3-2 seems to want me to reinstall AMDS. I would like to keep up to the current version. We do a slow rolling upgrade over the cluster, where each node is booted into an upgraded copy of the system disk over a period of ~ 3 to 6 months. Each time a node is rebooted into the disk, the rolling upgrade continues. We have 3 systems upgraded, 6 still to go. AMDS fails getting data from the newly upgraded nodes even after successfully starting the data provider. I get the following message %AMDS-I-NOLBR, cannot find library AMDS$CONFIG:AMDS$VMSAXP-V732.LIB for node xxx where xxx is the node name when I issue the AVAIL/MOTIF command on any node. Will a reinstall on the 7.3-2 nodes fix this, as I suspect?

[Ian Miller.]

There are two parts to AMDS. The data provider (rmdriver) part is supplied with VMS and is upgraded with VMS. The console is seperately installed and is upgraded seperatley. For each version of VMS there is a .LIB file in AMDS$CONFIG. These are supplied with the AMDS console and newer ones are included with the newer version of the console. Sometimes you can copy the .lib files from a system running a newer version of the console to a system running an older version. However its generally a good idea to upgrade the console to get the latest features and bug fixes.

The answer to your question is to install the current DECamds Console kit and all will be fine. This will be on the VMS CDs or from the Availability Manager web site
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/availman/

[Volker Halle]

Dave,

to clarify on Ian's answer, you need to install the NEW AMDS (V7.3-2) kit on the OLD (V7.3-1) OpenVMS systems, so that they'll get the library for the new OpenVMS version.

You only have one kit for AMDS, you need to modify the OPTIONS to also install the GUI:

Do you want the defaults for all options? [YES] NO

and then answer YES to the question about also installing the data analyzer.

For AVAIL_MAN, there are now 2 separate kits: AVAIL_MAN_COL (collector) and AVAIL_MAN_ANA (the GUI).

Volker.

[Bart Zorn_1]

Both products *should* have the same functionality by now, but the fact that AM is written in Java makes it really hard to use. Even on a DS15 with 1 GB memory it is not fast.

What is still missing from AM is the System Overview window of AMDS. AM allows you to view only one group at a time.

Regards,

Bart Zorn

[Bob Blunt]

Check the release notes for the product. Most of the current releases will install on older versions of OpenVMS and "do the right things" I try to keep the most recent version installed on the console manager system(s) in our lab and cascade that release down through our clients as required or possible. I'm pretty sure that the current release will load the client pieces on anything down through V6.2-ish.

bob

[Barry Kierstein]

All,

Here are some answers to what has been brought up lately.
To veiw newer versions of OpenVMS, one must upgrade a system with the latest kit. For the most part, the support for a newer version of OpenVMS is in the data collection programs which are part of the Data Analyzer (GUI). Sometimes the Data Collector/Provider piece (RMDRIVER) is enhanced for a release of OpenVMS, but the Data Analyzers are coded to know what version of RMDRIVER they are communicating with, and what the capabilities are.
In conclusion, most of the time you get support for a newer version of OpenVMS by just installing and using the new version of the Data Analyzer.

Barry Kierstein
No longer "Eber"...

[Jan van den Ende]

Piet,

From your Forum Profile:


I have assigned points to 32 of 100 responses to my questions.


Maybe you can find some time to do some assigning?

Mind, I do NOT say you necessarily need to give lots of points. It is fully up to _YOU_ to decide how many. If you consider an answer is not deserving any points, you can also assign 0 ( = zero ) points, and then that answer will no longer be counted as unassigned.
Consider, that every poster took at least the trouble of posting for you!

To easily find your streams with unassigned points, click your own name somewhere.
This will bring up your profile.
Near the bottom of that page, under the caption â My Question(s)â you will find â questions or topics with unassigned points â Clicking that will give all, and only, your questions that still have unassigned postings.

Thanks on behalf of your Forum colleagues.

PS. â nothing personal in this. I try to post it to everyone with this kind of assignment ratio in this forum. If you have received a posting like this before â please do not take offence â none is intended!

Proost.