Considerations about deploying with containers

Some considerations about your HCL Workload Automation environments when the product components are deployed using containers.

An environment deployed with containers has some characteristics that differ from an environment installed using the classic installation method. Following a list of its characteristics:

  • Container deployment is supported only for dynamic agents and not for fault-tolerant agents, and external fault-tolerant agents are not supported on kubernetes.
  • All dynamic agents must obligatorily be configured to use a dynamic agent gateway.
  • Each time a switcheventprocessor command is issued, a switchmgr command must also be issued on the same node.
  • An on-premises fault-tolerant agent cannot connect to a master domain manager for on-cloud solutions supported by HCL Workload Automation (only dynamic agents are supported).
  • The HCL Workload Automation event processor service must run on the same machine where the current master is running because the host and port are re-mapped by dynamic agents to use the master server host and port. Thus, performing a switch from master to backup master, you must also switch the event processor on the new master.
  • The console, server and agent components are installed with non-root user (wauser) that does not include sudoers privileges. This implies that jobs that run on agents on containers can run only with wauser user and cannot impersonate other users.
  • An extended agent component, (RELEASE_NAME-waserver-0_XA), is automatically created on the server. It starts the scheduling process by running the FINAL job stream that generates the daily production plan.
  • An FTA container is not provided (only dynamic agents are supported in containers).
  • By default, the FINAL job stream has a start time of 07:00 and invokes MAKEPLAN at 07:00. The Start of Day is 00:00. MAKEPLAN extends the plan until 09:00 the following day. If you modify the scheduling time of the FINAL job stream to a time different from the default, then evaluate whether you should also manually modify the plan extension time defined in the MAKEPLAN job accordingly.
    The following is an example of the default output when you run planman showinfo:
    Locale LANG set to the following: "en"
Plan creation start time: 06/23/2020 00:00 TZ UTC  
Production plan start time of last extension: 06/24/2020 09:00 TZ UTC  
Production plan end time: 06/25/2020 08:59 TZ UTC  
Production plan time extention: 024:00  
Plan last update: 06/24/2020 07:00 TZ UTC  
Preproduction plan end time: 07/08/2020 00:00 TZ UTC  
Start time of first not complete preproduction plan job stream instance: 06/23/2020 00:00 TZ UTC