What an exciting year 2014 was with both BMC BPPM 9.5 and BMC TrueSight 9.6 going strong! I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your continuous trust and support. May 2015 bring you more success and happiness.
To continue our discussion on best practices regarding to the total cost of ownership of BPPM, we are going to talk about when you should not use out-of-box default values in your BPPM implementation. Since there will be almost endless situations when using the default values is not a good idea, let's take a look at three different examples.
The first example is the installation directory path. The default installation directory path for BPPM installation is C:\Program Files\BMC Software\. The spaces used here can potentially make your customization scripts fail. The long path name can potentially truncate your file name in those deep-down sub-directories. In addition, you should use a disk drive other than C to lower BPPM's performance impact on Operating System. Assuming you have a E drive available, a much better installation directory path for BPPM installation would be: E:\BMC\.
The second example is the remote cell names. The default remote cell name supplied by BPPM installer is the hostname where the cell is being installed. If you are setting your remote cells in an application cluster, you need to use the same cell name for its backup cell running on another host. For example, when you are installing remote cells in an application cluster on server A and B, if you take the default cell name, you would name the cell as 'A' for both cells running on server A and server B. This would cause a lot of confusion when configuring the event sources sending events to this cell, not to mention most hostnames are very hard to remember. A better way to name your remote cells is to name it based on environment, function, and/or H/A type. For example, I would name my remote cell receiving Entuity events in an application cluster running on production environment as PRD_ENTUITY_HA.
The third example is the event database size for a remote cell. By default, event database size in mcell.conf is set at 360,000 (EventDBSize=360000). Each PATROL event is about 4K. For 360K events, the maximum event DB size would be 360K * 4K = 1.44GB. If this size is more than half of the RAM size on the server, you would most likely see a long running time for cell's state builder and your cell would be nonresponsive while its state builder is running. Ensure your EventDBSize is less than 50% of RAM size. If you are running multiple cells or sharing the server with BPPM integration service, you need to be even more conservative.
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