BPPM 9.5 Quick Start - Part 7: Additional cell installation and configuration

For event-only integration, you will need to install additional BPPM cells.  Unless you have a small environment, it is recommended that you install these additional BPPM cells on their own servers not shared with BPPM integration services.

The first BPPM cell on a server is installed by running BPPM agent installer.  During the installation, you need to select only 'BMC ProactiveNet Remote Cell'.  When you are asked to input a cell name, it is recommended to choose your own cell name using the name convention you have established. BMC ProactiveNet Event Adapter and BMC Impact Event Log Adapter for Windows will be automatically installed in addition to BMC ProactiveNet Event Manager.

As long as you keep the maximum mcdb size of each BPPM cell under 1/2 of the server memory, you can run multiple BPPM cells on one server to fully utilize its resources.  Subsequent BPPM cells on the same server should be created by running 'mcrtcell' command.

It is highly recommended to configure all your BPPM cells in high-availability mode.  When you do configure your BPPM cells in high-availability mode on a pair of servers, let half of the cells use one server as their primary node and let the other half of the cells use the other server as their primary node.

In addition to BPPM cells that receive events from your 3rd-party monitoring tools directly or through SNMP adapter and email adapter, if your server has more capacity, you can also create correlation cell and notification cell on the same server.

Your correlation cell receives events from your first-level cells including PATROL cells and event-integration cells.  The correlation cell updates and correlates events from different event sources.  Your notification cell sends email and AlarmPoint notifications for selected events.  You can combine your correlation cell and your notification cell into one cell depending on how simple or complicated your cell knowledge base is.

BMC recommends to use BPPM server cell to create automated incident tickets.  But if the incident tickets are not related to service model, you can create the tickets in your notification cell.  The advantages of creating incident tickets in notification cell are: 1) You can offload the resource intensive ticket creation operation from BPPM server to as many notification cells as you need to improve the scalability; 2) You can configure your ticket creation operation as high-availability to improve the reliability.