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Choosing the best time to migrate

Depending on your choice of migration scenario, there may be periods when the administration server is not available to the runtime servers or a runtime server is not available to its agents. It would be better if you could time these periods to occur when the Tivoli License Manager environment is less active. This is largely intuitional; for most organizations weekends, holidays and nighttimes are quiet periods. However, if you want to find out when there is typically least activity in your Tivoli License Manager environment, you can run some queries against the tables in the V1.1.1 administration server database.

The administration server database tables that need to be queried are called ADM.USAGE and ADM.USAGE_H. The first contains recent use data (the length of the period is a customizable figure in the system.properties file on the administration server), and the second contains aggregated historical data. Particularly useful in determining the software use are the START_TIME and END_TIME fields of the ADM.USAGE table, that show the moment that a software item was started and closed.

By querying this data you can look at the following factors:

You are likely to fund that users in divisions of your enterprise that carry out administrative activities are less active over weekends. However, users in sales areas may be more active at weekends, depending on the type of sales activity, while users in manufacturing, where shift work is the norm, may show a more even pattern throughout the week.

You may find that some types of user often work for some hours without opening or closing applications, so that carrying out operations on the administration server, for example, would have little impact because the migrated server could be made available to the unmigrated runtime servers while the applications were still running.

You may also find that many users switch off their computers over weekends, with a matching reduction in monitoring of base products, such as operating systems, e-mail browsers, and so on.

You should also take into consideration any periodic activity that is planned, such as inventory scans, and set the frequency of such scans so that the period of the migration falls between scans.


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