Lessons Learned from Migrating BEM 7.4 to BPPM 9.0 - Part 8: Dual GUI

Back in Part 2, I mentioned that one of the major limitations to migrate BEM 7.4 to BPPM 9.0 is the lack of GUI access for up to 10 minutes during BPPM server failover. We are a hospital environment, we have enterprise service desk operators monitoring BEM/BPPM GUI 24x7 to escalate trouble ticket acknowledgement and processing.

In BPPM 9.0, a web GUI is used as operations console. Because the web server is located on BPPM server and it takes up to 10 minutes for the secondary BPPM server to resume operation during BPPM server failover, our service desk would experience a total enterprise blackout for up to 10 minutes. This limitation does not meet our business requirement in a hospital environment. It had been holding us from migrating to BPPM sooner. To overcome this limitation, we had to think out of box again.

In BEM 7.4, a Java GUI (BMC Impact Explorer) is used as operations console. All cells and login servers are set up in their native application-level failover with no downtime. During the failover, our service desk operators would see the yellow highlight for several seconds before all operations are resumed. We decided to see if we can mix BPPM 9.0 cells with BEM 7.4 login servers and BMC Impact Explorer.

We made no change to BPPM 9.0 configuration on BPPM server, BPPM agents, and BPPM cells. We kept a pair of BEM 7.4 login servers (also called admin servers) on two separate Windows servers. We simply registered all BPPM 9.0 cells with these two BEM 7.4 login servers. Now our service desk operators can continue using the Java GUI (BMC Impact Explorer) to access BPPM 9.0 cells.

During BPPM server failover, the only cell that our service desk operators cannot see for up to 10 minutes is BPPM main cell - which displays intelligent events generated by BPPM server and service impact only. All alerts raised by monitoring tools, all email notifications, and all automated Remedy ticket generation are displayed and processed by remote cells with application-level failover. Our service desk operators can continue seeing all of them during BPPM server failover. Absolutely no downtime and no enterprise blackout! We were so thrilled to see how great the hybrid configuration worked.

For ESM administrators and operations support, we can pick and choose between BPPM 9.0 web GUI and BEM 7.4 Java GUI. BPPM 9.0 web GUI allows us to associate data with events while BEM 7.4 Java GUI gives us fast access to events and dynamic tables. By keeping both BPPM 9.0 web GUI and BEM 7.4 Java GUI, not only we avoided total enterprise blackout, we were able to convince everyone to finally migrate BEM 7.4 to BPPM 9.0.