Administering the CMS

See the following scenario depicting the Central Management Servers keeping the BI platform components working together.

Administering the Central Management Server (CMS) is important for managing and maintaining the overall BI platform.  

The CMS System database serves as a central repository for system configuration, security, and scheduling information.  

The administrator needs to ensure that there is at least one Running and Enabled Central Manager Server in the system. In addition, you need to ensure connectivity between the CMS Server and CMS System database. Without connection to the system database, the BI platform may not function correctly or may not be able to retrieve essential configuration data. 

A simple tracking algorithm is used by the CMS to confirm your authentication. So when you log on, a CMS session is created. The CMS preserves this session until you log off if the session was terminated or if it reaches the timeout setting.

When you change the CMS properties, you must restart the server for the changes to take effect.

Click on the following link to view the Central Management Server properties.

Central Management Server properties

The following link describes the server metrics that appear on the Metrics screen for CMS.

Central Management Server Metrics

The CMS System database stores BI platform information. System database store information about the folders, servers, users, groups, schedules, and other objects.

When installing the BI platform, the administrator must choose one of the supported database types for the system database. The install process will execute scripts to populate the database (unless an existing CMS database is selected). If needed, the installation program can even install a default database engine.

The CMS System database does NOT need to be on the machine as your organization's operational data. It's recommended to keep them separate.

The following link describes the CMS process flow when you schedule a program object to run at a specific date and time.

Setting a schedule for a program object

When adjusting the CMS properties, consider the following points:

• The CMS saves object meta-data in a cache. Reading from memory is faster than reading from a database.
• The SAP BI 4.3 Sizing Guide states that a CMS uses over 1 gigabyte of memory. This assumption means that each object is around 10 kilobytes, but could be more or less.

Check the CMC for the number of objects in your system database. Consider increasing the CMS size if the number of objects is over 100,000.

At any given time, you can check the metrics of the CMS. You can also see how many objects there are in total in the system database. Few objects make it unlikely that you need to increase the value for the CMS cache. However, if you have a million (or more) objects in the CMS system database, it is worth increasing the value for better performance.

CMS clustering is having more than one CMS in the same system, either on the same machine and/or several machines.  CMS clustering offers many benefits in a large BI implementation.