IBM Planning Analytics On Prem

[harrytm1]

Hi all,

My colleague encountered an issue during testing of the recently released PAL 2.0 and PAx. After installing PAL and PAx, he tried to use PAx by launching the subset editor and cube view. In both cases, the resulting pop-up will fail to load. From the error tracing utility, he found that PAx is calling a folder relating to PAW.

He did try to install PAW in the same server but did not complete the installation. Nevertheless, why is PAx looking up PAW's file path when PAW is an optional item?

Hope someone can shed some light on this. I will get some screenshots to describe the error better later.

Many thanks in advance!

[Steve Rowe]

Hi,
The architecture has now changed.
PAx needs to point at PAW in the admin host, plus IE11 or Edge is required client/ PAx side for the common objects (i.e. subset editor and cube viewer) to load.

[harrytm1]

Hi,
The architecture has now changed.
PAx needs to point at PAW in the admin host, plus IE11 or Edge is required client/ PAx side for the common objects (i.e. subset editor and cube viewer) to load.

Thanks, Steve. Was wondering if this is really true so we are installing PAW on a separate image to confirm this. Having said that, how would the licensing part works? If a customer does not buy PAW add-on licenses, but still want to use PAx on PAL 2.0, they will still need to install PAW. How can PAW be configured such that their users don't end up using PAW features?

[Steve Rowe]

Hi, Yes its really true, we've been involved in the Beta

The licence is such that it costs money to use the workspace as a consumer. Administrators are allowed to use the admin functionality in PAW for free too (i.e. the dimension editor).

That said I'm not licensing specialist (I always find it very wrong that you need to have a licensing specialist to work IBM). I believe the above to be the intent of the license.

[Bakkone]

Its funny how IBM screwed all their current clients over by having us pay twice for PAW. Then they also screw up so we need more servers to run the thing. By doing so they also gave themselves legacy problems so they screwed themselves as well!


But the new SAP Business Objects for Planning looks real good...

[harrytm1]

Another thing to note. It appears that we cannot use 10.2.2 Perspectives to connect to PAL models. Can someone confirms this too?

This is a departure of previous upgrade. Perhaps things don't work this way for major release. We will check the cfg file to see if it's due to any min/max version parameters being used.

Another major gripe is now we have another modelling tool to manage i.e. PAW. Although it's just for maintaining dims and creating hierarchies, it gives rise to the possibility of having to use Architect for main modelling tasks, Performance Modeler to set up Applications and PAW for creating hierarchies. Not looking forward to explaining this to users.

[Elessar]

Harry,
this can be because of the upgrade to TLS 1.2.
Upgrade your perspectives to FP6 or enable preTLS 1.2 in tm1s.cfg: "SupportPreTLSv12Clients=T"

More information is here: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.w ... wg27048181

[David Usherwood]

Not sure who else is going this route.
For demoing On Prem PAW, we are trying out two approaches, both under VMWare Workstation:
a Windows Server 2016, running PAW via Docker Toolbox;
b Ubuntu, running Docker native.
I'm pursuing the latter. Nothing insuperable on the install, although the script said the user needed to be a member of the Docker group and then ignored it when it was done - cleared by a restart (thought that was Windows behaviour?). But running Start.sh gives:

IBM Planning Analytics Workspace Administration
Install/Update IBM Planning Analytics Docker images (y/n)? (default n): y
Installing/Updating IBM Planning Analytics Docker images
Loading image file images/images.tar, this will take a few minutes...
Start the Administration Tool? (default y): y
Starting IBM Planning Analytics Workspace Administration Tool, please wait...
Running on http://127.0.0.1:8888
Press Ctrl+C to stop the tool
Error response from daemon: No such container: admintool
Exited

Linux/Ubuntu environment is:

Linux ubuntu 4.4.0-53-generic #74-Ubuntu SMP Fri Dec 2 15:59:10 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Be good to hear from anybody else who has tried this approach. I plan to raise a PMR but do not anticipate a productive dialogue from that

[dr.nybble]

Check log/admintool/up.log

[David Usherwood]

Solution (many thanks to the Doctor) is that Ubuntu's docker is not kept up to date. Pick up the latest from
https://github.com/docker/compose/releases
which amounted to executing

curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/relea ... ose-`uname -s`-`uname -m` > /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

to get the latest version. Following that, the Admin Console came up nicely.

[harrytm1]

Harry,
this can be because of the upgrade to TLS 1.2.
Upgrade your perspectives to FP6 or enable preTLS 1.2 in tm1s.cfg: "SupportPreTLSv12Clients=T"

More information is here: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.w ... wg27048181

We added the said parameters and it still does not work on PAL. Anyone has the same issue?

[harrytm1]

Hi all,

We are still facing issues with installing PAW on a virtualised environment using VirtualBox and a Windows Server 2008. We have to enable VT-x hardware virtualisation setting in VirtualBox for the VM as the OS of the VM is 64-bit. But because of this, we cannot further apply the same setting for the Docker image within the VM again.

Has anyone managed to successfully install PAW in a virtualised environment that is running on Winders server?

I found this in Supported Environment website for PAL 2.0 and it says "This product does not run on any hypervisors.". Not nice...

[gtonkin]

Has anyone managed to successfully install PAW in a virtualised environment that is running on Winders server?

After assistance from dr.nybble, I configured a Linux CentOS VM running under Windows Hyper-V - see this post.
Playing with the VM that is created using the boot2docker ISO i.e. BusyBox linux. At this stage I am running the OS, has the paw files across using ftpget but battling to run the scripts as they are bash and BusyBox does not support this. For now however, I will probably stick with my CentOS VM.

[David Usherwood]

@elessar, I have just tested out using Perspectives/Architect 10.2.2 FP3 to access a PA environment. Following the link I have added
SupportPreTLSv12Clients=T
to tm1s.cfg, and also changed the setting on the admin server using Cognos Connection (and tried disabling the Windows firewall just in case). No servers show. There is no ClientVersionMinimum in tm1s.cfg and the message log shows the minimum as 80000001.
Not good for the brave clients who might want to upgrade

[declanr]

@elessar, I have just tested out using Perspectives/Architect 10.2.2 FP3 to access a PA environment. Following the link I have added
SupportPreTLSv12Clients=T
to tm1s.cfg, and also changed the setting on the admin server using Cognos Connection (and tried disabling the Windows firewall just in case). No servers show. There is no ClientVersionMinimum in tm1s.cfg and the message log shows the minimum as 80000001.
Not good for the brave clients who might want to upgrade

We saw this a while ago and think it depends on what method you used to update your SSL Certs on 10.2.2... as in are you using the same certs for 10.2.2 architect as your PA2.0 server?

[David Usherwood]

Good thought - but they are the same.

[harrytm1]

Hi David,

Yes, we faced the same issue too i.e. unable to detect PAL v2 TM1 models using 10.2.2 Perspectives (FP4 or Fp6) despite setting that tm1s.cfg parameter and aligning the SSL cert. This means any upgrade to PAL will require all Excel clients to be upgraded as well.

[David Usherwood]

Confirmed on IBM's Planning Analytics forum that you do need to upgrade the 'legacy' client
https://community.watsonanalytics.com/d ... /view.html

[Gabor]

I didn't fully trust the missing compatibility statement in dev works.
Therefore I've raised this question once again asking IBM support, if TM1 Server 11.0.0, which comes along with Perspectives 10.3.1 (both bundled in PA local 2.0.0) would support older TM1 clients (namely 10.2.2). This is the answer I received today:

"Yes. Perspectives 10.2.2 can connect to TM1 server 11.0.0 as the server is compatible with lower version of client. However, we use new SSL certificates for Planning Analytics 2.0. Hence you might want to upgrade the SSL certificates on the client side or find workaround for that."

I haven't tried so far, any opinion on who is right?

[Gabor]

There is a technote out now, which shows a couple of additional steps:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.w ... wg21998731

Certificate ID is case sensitive and must be "TM1Server" (step5).