Add a Portal application using the following url:

http://<your server>:<your port>/SASWebReportStudio/logonFromPortal.do

Good SAS Admin practice is not use either of these accounts to schedule your production batch runs, but to create a new user for this specific task.

Of course the steps to creating new LSF users is buried in the middle of a raft of user and admin guides so most customers I deal with don;t bother.

Michael from Scorpio (he is Australian and drinking out of saucers at the moment has written a step by step blog that describes what you need to do to achieve this process over here:

Platform Suite for SAS – Dev/Test/Prod Tips 

Save User Frustration by adding the magic ‘Log (back) In’ button

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/whatsdiff/63928/HTML/default/viewer.htm#n187p76ccvsi57n1532c21g7quex.htm

To set this property, make the following changes to the SAS Web Report Studio properties in SAS® Management Console.

1. On the Plug-ins tab, select Application Management ► Configuration Manager ► Web Report Studio 4.3.
2. Right-click and select Properties to open the Web Report Studio 4.3 Properties dialog box.
3. Click the Advanced tab.
4. Click Add to open the Define New Property dialog box.
   For the Property Name, enter wrs.sections.tabs
   For the Property Value, enter true.
5. Click OK twice to exit both dialog boxes and save the changes.
6. Restart your Web application server.

When this property is set to true, sections can be accessed via tabs and via the drop-down menu in the Table of Contents pane on the left.

http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/gridmgr/index.html

Grid Computing in SAS 9.2, Third Edition

http://support.sas.com/rnd/scalability/grid/grid_testingbench.pdf

http://blogs.sas.com/supportnews/index.php?/archives/126-Demystifying-SAS-Grid-Computing.html

Code Snippets

SAS Technical Notes

SAS Forum Papers

Paper 098-2009 - Data Integration in a Grid-Enabled Environment
Cheryl Doninger, SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC Nancy Rausch, SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC

Found this table of roles for WRS on the SAS Support site here:

Predefined Roles and Capabilities for SAS Web Report Studio

By the way the trick on the edit tab is to make sure PUBLIC doesnt have access to the WRS roles, which is does seem to by default.

“Note: By default, the PUBLIC group is a member of both the Web Report Studio: Report Creation and the Web Report Studio: Report Viewing roles. So, when you are ready to restrict access to specific capabilities, remember to remove PUBLIC (which includes all users in your deployment) from the applicable roles.”

Usage Note 30789: Implementing the most basic view-only access to reports in SAS® Web Report Studio

In order to be functional, some capabilities have prerequisites. Following is an explanation of each capability and prerequisites for certain capabilities:

Basic:Comments

provide access to Comment Manager.

Basic:Print

generate PDF output.

Basic:Allow Direct Access to Information Maps

open information maps directly as reports. Without this capability, information maps are suppressed from the Open and Manage pages. With this capability, users can access information maps from the Open and Manage pages and view them as reports. Users who have the Create Report capability can select an Edit action when an information map is selected.

If you are using (or if you migrated from) SAS Web Report Studio 4.2, then the name of this capability is Open Maps as Reports.

Basic:Allow Direct Access to Cubes

open cubes directly as reports, or open cubes as information maps when specifying a data source. Without this capability, cubes are suppressed from the Open and Manage pages. With this capability, users can access cubes from the Open and Manage pages and view them as reports. Users who have the Create Report capability can select an Edit action when a cube is selected.

This capability is new in SAS Web Report Studio 4.3.

Basic:Allow Direct Access to Tables

open tables directly as reports, or open tables as information maps when specifying a data source. Without this capability, tables are suppressed from the Open and Manage pages. With this capability, users can access tables from the Open and Manage pages and view them as reports. Users who have the Create Report capability can select an Edit action when a table is selected.

By default, this capability is not assigned to any roles because it would allow users to bypass BI row-level permissions. If you have not implemented BI row-level permissions, then consider adding this capability to the same roles to which Allow Direct Access to Cubes is assigned.

This capability is new in SAS Web Report Studio 4.3.

Basic:Promote Web Report Viewer to Web Report Studio

displays the SAS Web Report Studio interface when a user requests to view a report from another product such as SAS Information Delivery Portal. Initially, this capability is assigned to all predefined roles. If this capability is unassigned, and a user’s request to view a report from within another product is granted, then the SAS Web Report Viewer interface is used to present the report. When this capability is assigned to a role to which a user belongs, the SAS Web Report Studio interface is displayed when that user requests to view a report through the SAS Information Delivery Portal or other products.

Basic:Refresh Data

refresh data for reports.

Basic:Modify Repository

provide basic modifications to repository such as copy, move, rename, and delete. This capability does not grant the ability to save changes to reports.

OLAP:Drill

perform an OLAP drill operation.

OLAP:Drill to Detail

drill through to detail data for a single OLAP value.

OLAP:Expand and Collapse

expand or collapse OLAP data.

OLAP:Expand and Collapse All

expand or collapse an entire OLAP hierarchy. This capability requires the Report Creation:Basic Edit capability and the OLAP:Expand and Collapse capability.

Output:Save

save changes to reports. This capability requires that the user also has Modify Repository capability.

Output:E-mail

e-mail a report link.

Output:Export

export report content to Microsoft Excel.

Output:Schedule Own Report

schedule reports authored by the users themselves. The Schedule All Reports capability is available in the SAS Web Report Studio’s Advanced role.

Report Creation:Create Report

create new reports. The Save capability is a prerequisite for this capability.

Report Creation:Basic Edit

perform basic editing operations for tables and graphs. Operations include:

• Assign Data
• Total dialog box access
• Control of Total Type for OLAP reports only (parent versus visual)
• Percent of Total
• Filter and Rank
• Conditional Highlighting
• Rotate Table
• View Data Details
• Sort, Sort Priority, Remove All Sort
• Move
• Hide
• Replace / Swap
• All Table Properties
• All Graph Properties

Report Creation:Aggregate or Detail

specify whether data is detail data or aggregated data (relational reports only)

Report Creation:Select All Data

able to choose “Select All” data items from the Select Data dialog box.

Report Creation:Select Data in View

use the Select Data dialog box to select data while viewing a report.

Report Creation:Copy Section

create a new report section that is a complete copy of another section. This capability is new in SAS Web Report Studio 4.3.

Advanced Report Creation:Create Cascade Prompts

create cascading prompts.

Advanced Report Creation:Create Report Links

create linked reports.

Advanced Report Creation:Create Remote Application Report Links

create linked reports that link to another SAS application. This capability is new in SAS Web Report Studio 4.3.

Advanced Report Creation:Advanced Edit

enable users to perform the following functions:

• Isolate
• Member Properties
• Suppress Empty

The Report Creation: Basic Edit capability is a prerequisite for this capability. In SAS Web Report Studio, the Include Member with Only Missing Values menu item is available only for multidimensional data sources. The Suppress Empty function in the Advanced Edit capability is required in order for users of multidimensional data sources to view and use the Include Member with Only Missing Values menu item under the Data Menu in SAS Web Report Studio.

Advanced Report Creation:Update Resources

update an invalid information map reference that is contained in a report definition. If you are using (or if you migrated from) SAS Web Report Studio 4.2, then the name of this capability is Repair Report.

Advanced Scheduling:Distribute

schedule a report distribution.

Advanced Scheduling:Save Archive

archive file versions. When creating a pre-generated version of a report (for example, a scheduled report), a version of the report is archived as a PDF file. Reports with archived versions are visually different in report selection dialog boxes, and access is allowed to these archived versions.

Advanced Scheduling:Schedule Any Report

schedule any report to which the users have WriteMetadata access, including the reports that they have authored.

Advanced Scheduling:Schedule Folder

schedule a folder.

Administrative:Manage Distribution List

create, edit, or delete a distribution list.

CAUTION:

Use of this capability creates a new physical table. Therefore, this capability must be restricted to few users. The distribution list contains e-mail addresses. Initially, this capability is not assigned to any SAS Web Report Studio role. An administrator can assign this capability to the Advanced role, or create a new role (for example, a role named as Manage Distribution) specifically for this capability and assign this role to a restricted number of users.   

Some recommendations I noted where:

• On Windows 2008 64-bit size: 4Gb of RAM per core. 1.5 x physical RAM for page file
• change default SORTSIZE to equal between 256MB-512MB (removes need for util files if it can be done in memory)
• up BUFSIZE to align with SAN storage stripe size
• undocumented settings UBUFSUZE and IBUFSIZE
• change default SAS MEMSIZE to between 512MB and 2Gb
• recommend between 30 and 50MB I/O throughput per core
• 9.3 metadata recommendations, separate server 4 cores, 4GB RAM – small, 8GB – med, 16GB large, I/O doesn’t really matter

One of the areas Margaret covered was the issues with file cache within Windows 2008.  Apparently Microsoft has re-written the file cahce system in Windows 2008 and R1 and then again in Windows 2008 R2.  Both of these versions have major problems with SAS environments that have a high I/O footprint.  SAS have raised the issue with Microsoft but have yet to have a resolution.

Interesting point was we experienced the same issue in Windows 2003:

Problem Note 36664: Potential issues with heavy SAS® I/O workloads on Windows 2003, 32- or 64-bit operating systems

You can read an excellent paper Margaret has authored at:

370-2011: Configuration and Tuning Guidelines for SAS®9 in Microsoft Windows Server 2008

Some other papers you may want to reference are:

The client has standardised on vSphere and I thought great SAS 9.2 supports vSphere (as much as the following SAS support page say’s SAS supports virtualisation)

SAS^® Product Support for Virtualization Environments

But after talking to Oracle about Weblogic support on VMware the answer is no, Oracle do not support any Oracle product on VMWare.

To quote from Oracle Metalink note: 249212.1 (found on a comment in response to another blog) :

“Oracle has not certified any of its products on VMware virtualized environments. Oracle Support will assist customers running Oracle products on VMware in the following manner: Oracle will only provide support for issues that either are known to occur on the native OS, or can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running on VMware. ”

“If a problem is a known Oracle issue, Oracle support will recommend the appropriate solution on the native OS. If that solution does not work in the VMware virtualized environment, the customer will be referred to VMware
for support. When the customer can demonstrate that the Oracle solution does not work when running on the native OS, Oracle will resume support, including logging a bug with Oracle Development for investigation if required.”

So what does Oracle Weblogic support in terms of virtualisation?  OVM of course.  Does SAS support OVM, of course not! (well actually this doesn’t seem to be true more on that later)

If we look at  SAS Supported UNIX Operating Environments we see that Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) is not on the list. If we look at  SAS Support for Alternative Operating Systems we see that OEL is not support but SAS will offer “best efforts” support.

The question is does OVM require OEL?

Well the answer is no, according to this Oracle VM Server for x86 FAQ OVM support Red Hat Linux (REHL).  So in theory we can run Weblogic on REHL in a OVM environment.

Is this supported by Oracle, yes it seems from all the links above.

Is it supported by SAS, well waiting to here back officially, but remember this SAS^® Product Support for Virtualization Environments states that they support any virtualisation (but have the same get out of jail free card as Oracle), so that should be a yes, SAS should support the use of OVM!

Now the real issue if after installing SAS eBI, using Oracle Weblogic on RHEL 5 within a Oracle VM environment we strike a problem, who the heck do we ring first?  (you know its going to be SAS Support right

When trying to open a SAS Report (.srx) in Outlook we got this error.

Looks like the SAS AMO 4.3 plugin relies on the Web Report Studio web services that automatically  get installed when you install the Web tier.

The issue of course is this customer is only using AMO and has not deployed any of the web tier, but in good optimal practice are using Information Maps and .srx reports (created via Enterprise Guide).

So looks like using Outlook to access these .srx is out.

Now I know Kiwi’s (New Zealanders) are known for their number 8 wire approaches and also being frugal (a large number are of course descended from the Scots , so a number of NZ customers have purchased BI Server and only implemented the SAS Server, Enterprise Guide and AMO, as that meets their current needs.  In these cases it looks like using the Outlook version is out of the question.

And with SAS announcing an AMO/EG only offering again use of .srx reports is out im guessing.

Anyway one positive is after playing briefly with the Outlook capability on my test server, I can actually see the Outlook capability taking over from the Portal eventually.  Why would users want to login to the Portal to get their reports when they can access them directly from within Outlook where they spend so much of their time?