SAS Platform

Testing I/O on your SAS Server

Apr
13

At the SAS Global Forum 2011 in the Grid architecture session , it was mentioned that SAS servers should be looking for a minimum I/O throughput of between 30-50mb/s per server (or Grid node).

There is a good SAS paper on how to test the I/O throughput of a SAS server on both Windows and Linux/Unix including code examples you can use.

You can find the paper here: http://support.sas.com/rnd/scalability/grid/grid_testingbench.pdf

If you run the code you might get the following error:

“ERROR: Shell escape is not valid in this SAS session.”

If so you will need to turn x commands on for the server, a SAS note outlining how to do that is here:

Problem Note 41058: Unable to submit X commands from SAS® Enterprise Guide® connecting to a SAS® Metadata Server when running SAS® 9.2 or later

 

 

 

grid requires 30-50mb I/O through put per node

 

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Having problems packaging up SAS 9.2 clients for automated deployment/install?

Apr
09

I have had a number of customers who’s IT departments have had no end of trouble trying to package the SAS 9.2 clients for automatic deployment.

They typically are trying to use the Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) capability to create a no touch way of installing the SAS Clients (Enterprise Guide, AMO etc) on users PC’s.

In the SAS Administrators group chat at SAS Global Forum the folks from SAS R&D said they recommend that rather than packaging the SAS Client install via SMS it is a much better option to use a install recorder function of the SAS Deployment Wizard / SAS Install Depot and create a SMS package that calls that.

The SAS Install Depot will need to be made available to all the users PC’s via a mapped drive etc, but you can secure it so the users can’t see it and its only accessible for the installer account that SMS is using to do the deployment.

SAS have posted a set of tips and techniques at:

Installation Note 37041: SAS® 9.2 quiet deployment tips and techniques

So pass the link onto your IT people if they are struggling to package up the SAS Clients as automated install packages.

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SAS on VMware, new SAS Best Practice paper

Apr
08

I had the pleasure of sitting through a session by Margaret Crevar on I/O limitations of SAS on windows 2008.  Will blog more on the sessions later but really the guts is if you are thinking of using SAS on Windows 2008 and have any sort of I/O requirements then the solution is simple…..

Go Linux.

Anyway once we got onto the discussion of I/O footprints we of course got onto the discussion of SAS on VMware.

Margaret mentioned she had just posted a Best Practice guide on SAS and VMware, which you can find here:

http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/MovingVirtuaVMware.pdf

As with all the papers Margaret seems to publish she actually puts the software through its paces in multiple scenarios before she posts her recommendations, so if you are looking at installing SAS on VMware its a paper well worth reading.

And importantly it was written in conjunction (or at least reviewed by) VMware themselves before publishing which is good news.

Actually overheard another conversation on Wednesday between a VMware person and a SAS R&D bod, which indicated that SAS was struggling to get to the right people in VMware for a while to form the relationships required, but that in the last few months the two companies have managed to connect the right people at the right level and things have accelerated quickly.  Good news for all SAS customers as virtualisation becomes more prevalent.

I wonder if the change is due to Oracle pushing its OVM platform much harder these days (some would say even mandating it) or its was just a matter of right people, right time?

Anyho main thing is the days of “no we don’t recommend running SAS on virtualised environments” seems a thing of the past, so one more step in the process of making SAS part of a standard operating environment for customers and less of an orphan.

 

 

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AMO 5.1/9.3 – Some nice features comming

Apr
07

Stopped by the AMO stand at SAS Global Forum 2011 and had a quick look at the new features coming out.

Things that took my interest:

  • AMO 5.1 will work with SAS 9.2 & 9.3, wahoo that will make upgrades easier
    (although any new feature that requires 9.3 will be grayed out if you are accessing a 9.2 backend)
  • In excel you can make a excel cell the basis for a Stored Process prompt, so that means you can setup custom drop downs in the Excel sheet that drives what the STP brings back (i.e month, region etc).  Think about the flexibility that will allow in building excel frontends to SAS
  • AMO 4.3 supports Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 & 2010, AMO 5.1 will only support Microsoft Office 2007 & 2010.  The main reason is the major use of ribbons in AMO 5.1.
    (and before you complain Office 2003 is over 8 years old remember!)

Bring on Q3 – 2011!

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Allowing user to publish content that everyone can automatically see in the portal

Mar
15

Doing some research on the new SAS Addin for Microsoft Outlook 4.3, to trouble shout an issue at a customer site (more on that later) when I came across this post on the SAS Support site.

Sample 36921: Using the SAS® Add-In for Microsoft Office to publish documents that can be accessed from the SAS® Information Delivery Portal

It describes a way to change the default content storage options so that when a user saves a document vis the SAS Addin for Microsoft Office, the conent is automatically available via the SAS portal.

I am a great fan of creating content once and making it easily available to as many users as is useful, via their preferred channel. This is a great technique to help with that approach.

 

 

 

 

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Enterprise Guide 4.3, Making it work with SAS Internal Userid’s

Mar
10

Had an interesting experience with the new SAS 9.2 environment at a customer site.

We have got SAS 9.2 (actually SAS Grid but thats irrelevant for this post) installed on RedHat 5 Linux.  As we are using Linux and not Windows we lose the standard integration with Active Directory.  We didn’t want to implement PAM integration with AD (mainly because nobody can articulate clearly all the steps required to get it working).

So we were left with Host authentication. As we only had a few users in this phase thats not so bad, but as we have a few servers (i.e Grid) I really wanted a easy way to avoid creating userid’s on each server.

Aha I thought Ill use internal SAS user id’s and then get the user to inherit a trusted/host user id to run the SAS processes.

So I setup the user in Metadata with an internal id, made sure they didn’t have a standard user identity (i.e username/pwd against DefaultAuth).  Also assigned the user to be a member of SAS General Servers (to inherit sassrv, planned to change this when it worked) and for extra fun added a OraAuth with a username/pwd for the Oracle DB and assigned the user as a member of that as well.

So into DI Studio and Information Map Studio as the user using the internal userid/pwd and:

  • Connect to metadata – tick
  • Access SAS app – tick
  • Access and SAS Table – tick
  • Run a query – tick
  • Access the Oracle table – tick
  • Run a query – tick

Now connect using EG 4.3 with same internal userid/pwd and:

  • Access metadata – tick
  • Access SAS App – nope

mmmmm talk to helpful onsite SAS installer, he could get it to work by adding DefaultAuth in the EG connection in the Auth Domain field.  Ok try that and yip all good.  So carry on testing.

  • Access SAS App – tick
  • Access SAS Table – tick
  • Run query – tick
  • Access Oracle Table – nope

mmmmm get a could not access Auth Domain.

So into some more tesing, worked out you can type what ever you ant in the Auth Domain connection to get this behaviour (i.e x would do the same as DefaultAuth).

As you do we tried all the combinations we could think of, and no cigar.  So helpful SAS installer logged tech suport track and just go this back.:

How to Configure SAS Token Authentication

Followed the distructions and wahoo we have lift off.

So it looks like you can’t use the standard Username/Password authentication method if you want to use internal userid’s/passwords and EG 4.3.

But SAS Token Authentication does work.

Now to test all the other options to see if this change effects anything else, oh the joy of testing …..

 

 

 

 

 

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New EG 4.3 Hotfix – 5 March 2011

Mar
07

Just noticed Chris has posted an entry outlining a new hotfix for Enterprise Guide 4.3.

Details are here: http://ftp.sas.com/techsup/download/hotfix/HF2/C44.html#C44006

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How to add the Outlook addin 4.3 after the fact – thanks Angela!

Mar
04

I while ago I posted about remembering to tick the box for outlook integration when installing AMO 4.3.

Barry commented that you dont see that tick box option when you do an upgrade from a previous version of AMO.

Angela has just posted a way of adding it after the fact over here  Super Important Tip on Upgrading from 4.2 to 4.2 Add-in to MS Office

(mental note to self, given this hidden executable and the EG migration wizard, really need to spend sometime one day clicking on all the .exe’s and see what else is hidden!)

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Installing Enterprise Miner 6.2 Client – Use the install and config option!

Mar
03

Had a weird one this week.

SAS are installing a Grid environment at a customer site.

We had already installed the SAS 9.2 clients on a dedicated Citrix box, so the dev team could test the new SAS 9.2 clients / functionality.

We wanted to add a few clients, including the Enterprise Miner 6.2 client (we aren;t installing a websever so can’t use the web based java client).

So ran the install wizard, selected add additional software and then selected Enterprise Miner client.  Install wizard went through ok and completed succesfully.

But there was no Enterprise Miner shortcut on the start menu, and if I clicked the em.exe I got nada.

After a bit of tooing and froing, the answer was to run the install wizard, do a planned deployment and only select the client tier and then Enterprise Miner.

Thing that is confusing is that Enterprise Guide, Management Console, DI Studio etc all installed ok via the add additional software option.

Just not Enterprise Miner (and no error messages of course).

I won’t rant about the fact that although a lot of the SAS products/client interfaces all finally share the same infrastructure components, user interfaces and functionality (im loving shared prompts), a number of them are stil orphans in this regard (why oh why doesnt EM use std metadata connection profiles like every other SAS client!)

But if you do find that you manually install Enterprise MIner client and it just doesn’t, try a planned deployment.

 

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Dual user accounts – making sure mr cockup doesn’t come to visit (credit to blackadder)

Mar
01

We always recommend to customers that they create two user ids for the SAS Administrators.

One that is granted standard user rights(or developer user rights) and one that is granted administrator rights.

(remember nobody should use sasadm should they!)

The reason is that it stops the administrator users from accidentally doing something they didn’t mean to when in the SAS environment (like delete a workspace server definition), as they will be using their normal account login.

When they need to do something gnarly they use their Administrator login and believe me when I say it does put you in a different head space.

(again your not using sasadm are you!, and we also don’t recommend shared admin user accounts, you need to be able to trace changes back to the admin user who did them)

In SAS 9.1 you were forced to created to host userid’s or Active Directory userid’s for each admin.

In SAS 9.2 you can use a dual account technique outlined here.

Its a short article so copied it here to save me one click later when I need it again.

Users, Groups, and RolesHow to Create a Dual User

To enable someone to alternately function as an administrator and as a nonadministrator, create two user definitions for that person as follows:

  • One definition is based on an internal account and is a member of the SAS Administrators group. See Add Administrators
  • The other definition is based on an external account and is not a member of the SAS Administrators group. See Add Regular Users.

Dual users log on with their internal account when they need administrative privileges and with their external account the rest of the time.

Note:   The only way to make someone a dual user is to give that person two user definitions, each based on a different account. You can’t create a dual user by adding a login to a definition that already has an internal account or by adding two logins to one definition.
Note:   Dual users should use a dedicated client-side connection profile for their internal account. In that profile, the user should leave the Authentication Domain field blank. This optimizes credential reuse.


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