Server group management

Question

Hi,
When setting up an architecture where servers should be accessible only to a subset of the platform's users, e.g. geographically dispersed installations, SAP has always said to use server groups and assign the content (i.e. the reports) to the corresponding server group.
Example:
Reporting databases are deployed in Belgium and France
2 hosts containing processing servers are installed in each of those countries
Reports are restricted to one of the two server groups
While this setup works fine for existing reports, what do you do with ad-hoc reports? E.g. a user creates a new Web Intelligence report against a universe that pulls data from the database in Belgium. As far as I can tell, there's no way that you can make that report use the processing server in Belgium. Instead, it will randomnly use a processing server that's available to handle its request.
Also, using server groups this way requires your users to set the processing server after they save the report for the first time, or create custom code based on the SDK that will assign the server group.
I've run into the same problem with deployments where there's a requirement to have processing servers dedicated to departments. As far as I can tell, there's no way to do this as there's no link between user and server (i.e. it's not possible to define which users or user groups have access to a server group).
I was hoping the multi-tenant feature in BI4 would provide some way around this, but it seems that's not how it works.
Any input regarding this type of setup is very welcome! Thanks.
Kind regards,
Kristof Speeckaert

Answer 1

Hi,
Thanks for your input.
I tried this in the past, but just to be sure, I did the following setup again (BI4 SP05):
Created two servers groups
Server group 1:
WebI Processing Server 1
Connectivity Adaptive Processing Server
WebI Adaptive Processing Server
Server group 2:
WebI Processing Server 2
Connectivity Adaptive Processing Server
WebI Adaptive Processing Server
Created one user group with one user in it
Denied access to server group 1 for the test group
The user group has full application and content rights
Scenario:
Logged on using the BI Launch pad
Opened and refreshed a sample WebI document
Brought the Webi Processing server in group 2 downOnly the WebI processing server in group 1 is up and running and the user group has no access to this server group.
Logged out and in again
Opened and refreshed the same sample document
Based on your suggestion, I shouldn't have been able to open nor refresh the sample document in step 5, however it worked without a problem.
This would mean that granting/denying users access to servers/server groups does not prevent them from using the server, in this case for opening and refreshing a WebI document.
Here's the relevant paragraph regarding server group access rights from the Administrator Guide:
You can use rights to grant people access to servers and server groups, allowing them to perform tasks such as starting and stopping servers.
If your server team needs to perform regular server maintenance tasks that require them to shut down and start up servers, you need to grant them rights to the servers. You may also want to delegate SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform server administration tasks to other people. Or you may want different groups within your organization to have control over their own server management.
Judging from this information, assigning rights to server groups should be used from administrative access to the servers, not to decide who get to use the server from an end-user perspective. The latter should be done by assigning server groups to documents/reports. However, this leaves us with the same problem when dealing with ad-hoc reports.
Kind regards,
Kristof Speeckaert