Automated Management for Tivoli’s TWS
Introduction
Tivoli’s TWS (formerly known as Maestro) is a cross-platform scheduling solution that can schedule jobs on a variety of platforms based on many criteria, including cross-platform dependencies.
The Itheon OpenVMS Extended Agent allows TWS to schedule jobs on a VAX/OpenVMS or Alpha/OpenVMS system, just as with any other supported operating systems. The OpenVMS machine can be hosted by any TWS (UNIX or Windows) master or FTA CPU.
The Itheon OpenVMS extended agent (x-agent) provides the ability to schedule jobs on any OpenVMS node from a TWS host CPU. Jobs can be scheduled as any OpenVMS user and can be directed to execute in any OpenVMS batch queue. The x-agent supports defining job or schedule dependencies on the existence of an OpenVMS file.
TWS Components
When TWS wants to run a job on a particular system (CPU), it looks at the CPU definition specified by the user to see what kind of agent will take care of the request. The different types of agent are:
Master. The main TWS system containing scheduling databases, etc.- Fault Tolerant Agent (FT agent). Other TWS systems, which possess copies of the database as downloaded to them from the master.
- Extended Agent (x-agent). A system running x-agent software that performs tasks as directed by either the master or an FT agent running an appropriate access method
The Itheon OpenVMS Extended Agent functionality is implemented as an x-agent.
Technical Overview
To accomplish job execution and file checking on an OpenVMS node, the TWS host CPU invokes a method program called OpenVMS. The OpenVMS method is an executable program that interacts with a detached process on an OpenVMS system via TCP/IP. This detached process calls operating system APIs (system services) to launch and manage the execution of the OpenVMS jobs.
The OpenVMS method has a supporting detached process called TWS_xAgent that must be installed and started on each VMS node that will be part of the TWS network.
Trust level security based on the standard UNIX TCP/IP hosts.equiv and .rhosts is used to determine which host CPUs and user may run jobs as which OpenVMS users.
Provided that trust is established, the x-agent will submit the job to the requested OpenVMS batch queue as the required user.
As with standard OpenVMS batch jobs, only the running of command procedures is supported. The command procedure must exist on the OpenVMS system.
Open Dependencies
An OPENS dependency in TWS is used when a job or schedule must wait until a file is available on a specific CPU. The OpenVMS extended agent supports the OPENS dependency by allowing any job or schedule on any TWS CPU to wait for the existence of a file on a VMS extended agent CPU.
Supported Versions of OpenVMS
The OpenVMS Maestro x-agent runs on OpenVMS V5.5-4 and above.
OpenVMS maestro x-agent access methods are available for:
- Windows
- Solaris
- HP-UX
- AIX
Summary
Established in 1987 and now part of Blue Chip Customer Engineering, Itheon is at the forefront of delivering innovative and flexible IT Service Management solutions creating competitive advantage by improving performance, increasing efficiency and providing full financial accountability and transparency.
Our building block modular approach provides an extensible and sophisticated solution to a wide range of IT issues. The flexibility of our products is such that they can be applied in various configurations to address the business issues faced within today’s IT environment.
Itheon understands the challenges businesses face and will work as an extension of your business to deliver results. We focus on building true partnerships that are mutually beneficial and based on trust and respect. This is why so many of our customers return again and again to benefit from our unique approach to IT issues.
