Control-M Server

Control-M/Server

The Control-M/Server is the heart of Control-M Workload Automation. In the

background, it submits jobs onto job execution hosts according to their dependencies

and priorities and tracks their status until the execution completes. Just the same as

Control-M/Enterprise Manager, Control-M/Server for distributed systems stores

information in its own database. (The reason we specifically stated distributed

systems here, is because Control-M for mainframe stores information in data files

rather than a database.) The stored information includes static job definitions, active

jobs (AJF), job execution statistics, job logs, and so on.

Control-M/Server for distributed systems can be installed on Windows, Unix, or

Linux machines. Control-M/Enterprise Manager and Control-M/Server can share

the same machine and same database, but users normally separate the two for

production environment to get better performance and in case of increase in load in

the future.

Control-M/Server processes

Control-M/Server is a collection of 9 core background processes, plus 1 configuration

agent process (introduced since version 6.3.01). Each process has its own role, such

as being in charge of internal communication, communication with Control-M/

Enterprise Manager, communication with Control-M/Agents, or handling job

submission, tracking, and logging. Each process also generates its own log file for

error diagnosis and monitoring. These processes are:

• SU: Supervisor

• SL: Job Selector

• TR: Job Tracker

• NS: Network Services

• CE: New Day and EM Communication Process

• CS: Client Service Process

• LG: Logger

• WD: Watch DogRT – Internal Communication Router

• CA: Control-M/Server Configuration Agent (Additional).

Processes Status

                   R                 Running

                   S                 Suspended

                   T or Z          Terminated

BMC Control-m Architecture High level Diagram.....

Control-M Architecture and Components

Control-M is well known for its three-tier architecture. By utilizing networking

technology, Control-M components among the three tiers can communicate with

each other freely, therefore work together to provide cross platform job submission

and tracking, and at the same time allow batch workload to be monitored and

managed from a centralized location.

Control-M/Enterprise Manager sits at the top layer. It provides the backend of

graphical user interface and administration facilities. The middle tier—Control-M/

Server is the schedule engine that performs the actual job submission and tracking.

And the bottom tier is Control-M/Agent that runs on different machines to handle

job submission requests from Control-M/Server. Control Modules and Agentless

hosts are also part of the bottom layer, but just under Control-M/Agent. This

is because Control Modules are only to be installed as add-on components of

Control-M/Agents and Agentless hosts are managed by Control-M/Server through

selected Control-M/Agent(s).

The combination of the three tiers is considered as a complete Control-M

environment. Each environment can have exactly one Control-M/Enterprise

Manager connecting with one or many Control-M/Servers, and each of the

Control-M/Server can connect with hundards or thousands of Control-M/Agents

as well as optionally some CMs attached or Agentless remote hosts.

Control-M Supported platforms

Control-M version 7 supports job submission on the following systems and versions:

• Microsoft Windows 2003/2008 (Standard and Enterprise Edition), XP

Professional, and Vista/7 (Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate) running on

32 or 64 Bit Intel/AMD processors.

• Oracle Solaris 8, 9 running on 32 or 64 Bits SPARC processors and version 10

running on 32 or 64 Bit SPARC or Intel/AMD processers.

• IBM AIX 5.2, 5.3, 6.1, and 7.1 running on 32 or 64 Bit power processors.

• HP-UX 11.11,11.23, and 11.31 running on 32 or 64 Bit PA-RISC processors or

64 Itanium processor (11.31 and 11.23 only).

• Red hat Enterprise Linux Server AS/ES 4 and RHEL Server 5 and 6 running

on 32 or 64 Bit Intel/AMD processors or IBM zSeries (except ES 4).

• Oracle Enterprise Linux Server 5 running on 32 or 64 Bit Intel/AMD

processors.

• Suse Linux Enterprise Server 9, 10, and 11 running on 32 or 64 Bit Intel/AMD

or IBM zSeries processors.

• iSeries (AS/400) V5R4, V6R1 and V7.1 (Control-M/Agent for iSeries 7.0.00).

• OpenVMS 6.2, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 (Control-M/Agent for OpenVMS 2.25.01).

• Tandem Guardian G06.xx and H06.xx (Control-M/Agent for Tandem

Guardian 6.3.02).

• UNISYS 2200 ClearPath OS 2200 9.x and 10.x (Control-M/Agent for UNISYS

2200 6.4.01).

Control-M's key features

The following is a summary of Control-M's key features (some of them are specific to the version 7 release and may not be offered as a part of the base package):

• Ability to schedule cross-platform batch flow.

• Allows real-time batch monitoring and management from a single point

of control.

• Supports calendar-based scheduling and event-trigger scheduling. Meets

complex scheduling requirements.

• Dynamically manages the execution of workload according to real-time CPU

resource utilization.

• According to the predefined rules, to automatically perform actions when

a job execution event has occurred (for example, a job failed with a certain

return code, or the job didn't run at the expected time).

• Allows batch execution history lookup.

• Automatically generates an alert when a job fails or a predefined condition

is met.

• Security enhancements – User profiling and authentication against

LDAP or Microsoft Active Directory, run-time job filtering (for example,

reject job submission if matching keyword found in job definition),

SSL-enabled communication between internal components, and auditing

of user actions provides various types of reports against the live or historical

batch environment.

• Job version control and built-in change management facility.

• Integration with ITSM and IT management software.

• Ability to relate batch jobs to business services.

• Forecasting capabilities for planning changes in the batch environment.