Installation Guide

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INSTALLATION GUIDE

The following guide describes how to install GEM.

If you are planning to using GEM, please contact Sql Technologies by email. We are interested in making your GEM Installation a success, and will provide installation support. We are aiming for full customer satisfaction and will work with you to make this product a success.

Pre-install check list

Suggestions on your first implementation

Database administrators can be, and should be, a cautious lot. We obviously roll out a tool like GEM to a single test box and install the client on our personal workstation. Lowest risk configuration and all that. An installation like that totally and completely buys you nothing. GEM will be of no value. That is totally and completely the wrong way to roll out GEM.

The correct way to roll out GEM is to implement it on between 4 and 6 test and dev servers at once using a 'server' class box as a monitoring station (it does NOT need to be a dedicated box but it runs a bunch of perl scripts). Obviously dont trial GEM on anything production (that includes your workstation). Your Trial needs this many systems to let you to see how the GEM software works. Plus, GEM is a LOT of effort to implement, so you might as well get some use out of your GEM trial.

Finally, ensure that you have defined ALL items on the GEM pre-install check list. For example, GEM loses half its value in a unix environment if you dont have 'no password' access via either ssh or rsh connectivity to your unix systems. Simarly, "ADMINSITRATOR GROUP" rights are required for direct access to your Windows servers log files. You need these. Additionally, it is highly strongly very suggested that you have a web server with a script capable directory into which you can place our cgi perl interface. While we do have a TK version of the interface, the web interface is the one you should use.

Presuming you have a reasonable network configuration, GEM has a pretty low footprint on everything but the monitoring host system. Network impact is mostly semi hourly fetches of your database error logs. GEM does install our system stored procedures on all your database servers. They are a nice package and you will like them. On the monitoring system, GEM runs a bunch of perl batch jobs - and frequently multiple jobs will run at the same time. We recommend multi processor systems as your monitoring systems, but most 2-4 year old server class systems will be fine (find some depricated system). Linux is a good choice for a monitoring system to monitor unix database.

As far as your database servers go, GEM has the experience to be a good citizen. GEM is designed by active dbas, not a lab by developers. Your developers and users should have not have any noticable degredation in performance as a result of GEM.

A good solid burn in environment for GEM should have between 4 and 6 database servers and 4 to 6 different host systems (of course nothing production should be touched). It would be slightly simpler to implement the trial if running all windows or all unix databases.

Download & initial setup


configure.pl

GEM Configuration Tool

configure.pl is the GEM configuration utility. This utility will build the configuration files (stored in the conf subdirectory) and runs some basic setup tasks for GEM. The GEM Configuration Tool is quite intelligent, and will survey your systems to give you a good baseline that should require minimal tuning to work within your environment.

Some of the things configure.pl does include: