Relay select for relays themselves

Usage and Config Platform
1

(imported topic written by SystemAdmin)

I’m running version 8.1.551.0 and looking at the actionscript for ID 773 - Install Tivoli Endpoint Manager Relay (Version 8.1.551.0) I see a relay select at the end. Why is this there when it’s my understanding that a relay does not support auto relay selection to another relay? Granted, I would love this feature, however based on what I’ve been told and read, this is currently not possible.

http://support.bigfix.com/bes/install/besrelayaffiliation.html

“BigFix Relays themselves do not use automatic relay selection when deciding which parent BigFix Relay or BigFix Server to use so the BigFix Relay affiliation process does not apply when BigFix Relays pick their parent. BigFix Relays will use the standard manual relay selection and failover behavior”

Thanks,

Keith

2

(imported comment written by BenKus)

“Relay select” tells the agent to switch to reporting through the local relay rather than its previous parent.

There is a way to make relays autoselect, but generally it is a bad thing because the relay selection tends to form long “relay chains” with many levels and it is not usually a good thing (adds more distribution time and load to your relay infrastructure).

Ben

3

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

Excellent, that makes sense, thank you.

The concept of a relay using autoselection to me would be very helpful. Can relays support affiliation, which could eliminate the relay chain issue that you pointed out? I will have probably around 500+ sites and would like a second relay in each site for redundancy. Ideally, I would like only one relay talking over the WAN to the top-level relay and the secondary relay talking to the primary remote relay. Unless I create hundreds of actions, I’m not sure of how I can have the second relay talk to the primary without having the client automatically find it. I will want to control it in some method, such as affiliation to eliminate it going over the WAN to another relay.

Thanks,

Keith

4

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

spdracers,

Here is a way to do relay auto selection. We use this effectively with over 1100 relays. First we set up a pool of central relays on the same LAN as the root server. The number of these will need to be computed based on load, type and size of relay. The performance of the disk subsystem is your most important consideration. Go for more/faster drives over a faster cpu.

In our pool of central relays, we designate one as the failover in the Adverstisement list. The rest of the relays get assigned a unique Advertisement name across all of them.

Side note: Is it important to work with your network engineers so that each central relay is the same hop count from your remote sites.

Now on the remote relays, set the following in a custom action:

setting “_BESClient_RelaySelect_FailoverRelay”=“http://:52311/bfmirror/downloads/” on “{now}” for client

setting “__RelaySelect_Automatic”=“1” on “{now}” for client

setting “_BESClient_Relay_EnableAutomaticSelection”=“1” on “{now}” for client

setting “_BESRelay_Register_Affiliation_AdvertisementList”="<unique local advertisement name based on location/function>"on “{now}” for client

setting “_BESClient_Register_Affiliation_SeekList”=";" on “{now}” for client

On clients in the remote location set the following:

setting “_BESClient_RelaySelect_FailoverRelay”=“http://:52311/bfmirror/downloads/” on “{now}” for client

setting “__RelaySelect_Automatic”=“1” on “{now}” for client

setting “_BESClient_Register_Affiliation_SeekList”=";;" on “{now}” for client

In this manner, remote relays will prefer the primary central array of relays, but they also have a failover. Remote clients use their local relay as their preferred primary, but can fail over to a central primary, then finally the central failover relay as needed.

Optionally, you may wish to throttle communications between remote and central relays. One way to accomplish this is limiting simultaneous connections on the central relays:

setting “_BESRelay_HTTPServer_MaxConnections”="" on “{parameter “action issue date” of action}” for client