Document revision date: 15 July 2002

Compaq Availability Manager Version 2.2

Release Notes

The following notes address late-breaking information and known problems for the Availability Manager Version 2.2. These notes fall into the following categories:

• Installation note
• Problems corrected
• New and changed features
• Operation notes
• Display notes

The note pertains to the installation of Availability Manager Version 2.2.

1.1 Uninstall Before Installing the New Kit

Before you install a kit with a new driver, you need to uninstall the old driver first. This is explained in the Version 2.2 installation instructions.

In addition, before uninstalling, you might want to make a copy of your .INI file as a reminder of the names of the groups you usually monitor.

2 Problems Corrected in Version 2.2

The following sections discuss key problems that have been corrected since the release of the Availability Manager Version 2.0-1.

2.1 Status Display in Cluster Members Summary Pane

In prior versions, the Availability Manager incorrectly displayed UNKNOWN or BRK_NON in the "Status" field. This problem has been corrected, and the field now correctly displays one of the values shown in the following table:

Status Value	Description
NEW	New system in cluster.
BRK_NEW	New system; there has been a break in the connection.
MEMBER	System is a member of the cluster.
BRK_MEM	Member; there has been a break in the connection.
NON	System is not a member of the cluster.
BRK_NON	Non-member; there has been a break in the connection.
REMOVED	System has been removed from the cluster.
BRK_REM	System has been removed; there has also been a break in the connection.

2.2 Changing Versions of OpenVMS

In previous versions, if a node stopped and then restarted under a different version of OpenVMS, the Availability Manager did not always function correctly. This problem has been corrected so that the Availability Manager gracefully handles version changes on the target system.

3 New and Changed Features in Version 2.2

The following sections discuss new and changed features introduced in this version of the Availability Manager.

3.1 Choosing a Network Card on Windows Systems

The Availability Manager Windows installation detects when a system has more than one network card and asks the user to select one for Availability Manager LAN communication. To change your choice at a later time to use a different network card, you must restart Availability Manager. This feature applies to both and Windows 2000 and XP systems.

3.2 New Availability Manager Driver

The new Availability Manager driver supports Plug-and-Play and Power Management on Windows 2000 and XP Systems and does not use Pathworks components. Therefore, the Availability Manager now supports laptop PCs and does not have conflicts with the Pathworks client product.

3.3 Colors of Columns Reordered in Group Pane

In the Group pane of the main Application window, the order of the colors of the columns indicating the various states of nodes in a group has been changed. You can now reduce the size of the window and still be able to see the black, red, and green columns at a glance.

3.4 New Cluster Display Features

The following items have been added to the Cluster Members pane (the lower pane on the Cluster Summary page). Note that these new features require that the OpenVMS Data Collector nodes run OpenVMS Version 7.3 or later and have RMDRIVER loaded at boot time. The Clusters chapter of Availability Manager User's Guide contains details of these features.

The following list outlines these new Cluster display features and the version of OpenVMS in which they were introduced.

• New SCA Port display (Version 7.3-1).
• New SCA Port fix to change the management priority assigned to a port (Version 7.3-1). Right-click anywhere on a Port display line to display a menu containing the Port fix option.
• Enhanced SCA Circuits line showing management parameters (Version 7.3-1).
• New SCA Circuit fix to change the management priority assigned to a circuit (Version 7.3-1). Right-click anywhere on the Circuit display line to display a menu containing the Circuit fix option (not in FT1 of Version 7.3-1 FT1)
• New LAN Adapter summary window (Version 7.3). Right-click one of the top-level Cluster Member nodes to display a menu containing the Adapter Summary option.
• LAN Adapter fixes available from the Adapter Summary window (Version 7.3). Right-click a handle preceding a node in the Cluster Members pane to display a menu containing the Adapter Summary window. Then right-click a data item in the Adapter Summary window to display a menu containing Adapter Fixes.

For the Cluster Summary page, a number of data collection programs are sent to OpenVMS nodes to collect data. Information for the top level of the Cluster Members pane comes from the node selected for the display. For any particular cluster member, two or more data collection programs might start.

In the Availability Manager Version 2.0-1 and earlier releases, programs that gathered cluster data start only when you select the Cluster Summary tab. All these programs stop when you select another tab. If you switch back to the Cluster Summary tab, the Cluster Members display restarts from the beginning. In addition, the SCA Summary, and SCS Connections programs start for each node in the cluster that the Availability Manager has configured. LAN Virtual Circuit and Channel Summary programs start only if you expand the tree to that level.

In Availability Manager Version Version 2.2, the Cluster Members program starts when the Node Summary page is created. This program fills in the top level of information in the Cluster Member pane. The SCA Summary and SCS Connections programs do not start at this time. The Cluster Members program runs whether or not you select the Cluster Summary tab. The SCA Summary and SCS Connections programs start only if you open that part of the tree.

Note that all data below the top level of the Cluster Members pane is collected from that member and not from the node selected in the Node Pane of the Application window. (A cluster member has a handle preceding it only if it has been configured by the Availability Manager.) When you switch to another tab, any lower-level programs are suspended and resume only when you switch back to the Cluster Summary tab. (The display is greyed out until fresh data is received.)

4 Operation Notes

The following sections contain notes pertaining to the operation of Version 2.2 of the Availability Manager.

4.1 Problem with Daylight Saving Time Changes

For some time zones, especially European ones, the time-zone logic in the Java software libraries that the Data Analyzer uses might disagree with the Windows operating system about when the shift to daylight saving time occurs. For a two-week period in early April and late October, you might see a one-hour discrepancy between the time shown in the Data Analyzer and the time of day shown by the system and the Date-Time Control panel.

Also, Sun's Java classes disagree with Windows about whether daylight saving time even exists for Asian time zones. The Windows DateTime CP usually indicates that daylight saving time is not possible for these zones; time strings generated from the calendar classes in Java appear to recognize a daylight saving time shift. Therefore, for all time zones between eastern Europe, going east to Alaska, a one-hour discrepancy is likely from April through October. This discrepancy occurs for months at a time.

For OpenVMS systems, make sure that the time zone differential logical name SYS$TIMEZONE_DIFFERENTIAL is defined correctly.

4.2 Event Reporting Problems

The following list contains known event-reporting problems that have been reported in Version 2.2:

• Unimplemented threshold events: LOSTVC NOPROC
• Event reporting irregularities:
  • Some posted events may not be canceled promptly when the condition goes away.
  • LOVOTE and LOVLSP events are posted for every node in the cluster rather than once per cluster.

If a session runs for many days, and the Data Analyzer is collecting data on many nodes, the Data Analyzer might run out of virtual memory (object heap). (See the Availability Manager installation instructions for Windows or OpenVMS for details on how to modify the heap size.) On Windows systems, the Data Analyzer does not report the problem. On OpenVMS systems, the Data Analyzer displays an "OutOfMemoryException" error in the window in which the Data Analyzer was started. On either system, one or more parts of the display might stop updating. The only workaround is to restart the Data Analyzer.

5 Display Notes

The following sections contain display notes pertaining to the Data Analyzer on all platforms and on OpenVMS systems.

5.1 Problems Using the Data Analyzer on All Platforms

The following sections contain notes about the display of the Data Analyzer on Windows and OpenVMS platforms.

5.1.1 What to Do If a Node Is Displayed Twice

A node can be displayed twice in the Node pane when the Data Collector (RMDRIVER) is started before the network transports are started. To avoid this problem, always start your network transports (DECnet) before starting the Availability Manager Data Collector.

5.1.2 Incomplete Repainting of Windows

If you obscure part of an Availability Manager window with another window, the obscured portion of the Availability Manager window might not repaint completely when you move the top window. This appears to be a Java Swing problem that is currently under investigation.

5.1.3 Page and Swap File Names in Event List Display

If page and swap file events are signaled before the Data Analyzer has resolved their file names from the file ID (FID), events such as LOPGSP display the FID instead of the file name information. You can determine the file name for the FID by checking the File Name field in the I/O Page Swap Files page. The FID for the file name is displayed after the file name.

5.1.4 Events Sometimes Displayed After Background Collection Stops

On both OpenVMS and Windows systems, the Data Analyzer sometimes displays events after users customize their systems to stop collecting a particular kind of data. This is most likely to occur when the Data Analyzer is monitoring many nodes. Under these conditions, a data handler sometimes clears events before all pending packets have been processed. The events based on the data in these packets are displayed even though users have requested that this data not be collected.

5.1.5 Truncated LAN Channel Summary Display

The LAN Channel Summary display might be disabled for some OpenVMS nodes if there are more than seven channels for that virtual circuit. This problem results from a restriction in the OpenVMS Version 7.3-1 PEdriver. When this restriction is removed (in remedial releases or later versions of OpenVMS), the full channel summary will be displayed. For this condition, the following error message is displayed:

Error retrieving ChSumLAN data, error code=0x85 (Continuation data disallowed for request)

5.2 Problems Using the Data Analyzer on OpenVMS Systems

The following sections contain notes about the display of the Data Analyzer on OpenVMS platforms.

5.2.1 Exiting Field on Data Collection Customization Page

While using the OpenVMS Data Collection Customization page on OpenVMS, if you change a data collection interval and press Enter to exit the field, the value is not entered as expected. You must use the mouse to move the cursor out of the field.

5.2.2 Long Runs Exhaust XLIB Resource ID

The version of Motif currently shipping with OpenVMS is based on X11R5. That release of X11 uses a resource ID allocation scheme that works poorly with the Motif support in Java for OpenVMS. As a result, most long-running Availability Manager sessions will stop updating the display at a time that depends on the speed of the OpenVMS machine. For example, a session running on a dual-processor 275 MHz system reported the following after 14 hours:

Xlib: resource ID allocation space exhausted!

On faster machines, this message was reported after only 8 hours. This problem is under investigation.

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