Implementing a Tivoli Solution for Central Management of Large Distributed Environments

Chapter 3. The Outlet Systems Management Solution Architecture 83

An important part of data storage and connection between Tivoli and an RDBMS

is the database systems themselves. In the Outlet Systems Management

Solution, the database system is intended to be on an external server, one that

only has the Tivoli endpoint installed, that will contain a RDBMS. This system will

be responsible for storage of:

򐂰 MDist2 distribution status and historical information

򐂰 Events received by the Tivoli Enterprise Console, including event adapters,

distributed monitoring, and software distribution, among many other event

sources

򐂰 Inventory configuration data

򐂰 Software package distribution, status information, and activity plans

The chosen vendor for the RDBMS system in the Outlet Systems Management

Solution is IBM DB2.

3.5 Network communications and considerations

Tivoli’s distributed architecture is designed to work across a wide variety of

systems throughout the Outlet Inc. network topology. The minimum requirement

for communication protocol support is bidirectional, full-time, interactive TCP/IP

connections.

3.5.1 TCP/IP

The Tivoli Management Environment contains several key systems, which when

installed and configured, make up the Outlet Systems Management Solution.

Within this Framework, there are communication methods and procedures used

to enable the transfer of methods, command, tasks, object references, and

object calls.

Figure 3-11 on page 84 shows the typical communication paths within a TMR. It

shows that communication between managed nodes, systems running the Tivoli

Object Request Server OSERV, communicate over TCP and, preferably, static IP

addresses. The figure also shows how the communications between the Tivoli

Gateways are performed over TCP using static or DHCP assigned addresses.

84 Implementing a Tivoli Solution for Central Management of Large Distributed Environments

Figure 3-11 Tivoli Protocol Communication

It is not necessary for an endpoint to be able to communicate with the TMR

server, because all communication to the endpoints are provided through the

hosting gateways.

TCP/IP Ports

In order to facilitate the correlation between the clients and servers, TCP/IP uses

a concept called

port. All TCP/IP connections are attached at each end by one of

these ports.

The port numbers between 0 and 1023, known as

trusted ports, are reserved for

standard services such as ftp, rexec and telnet. These trusted ports are attached

to the server side of the application. At the client side, when an application wants

to open a connection, it normally asks the operating system for a non-reversible

port, one with a number ranging from 1024 to 65535.

In Tivoli, the client/server communication is implemented by the oserv process.

The process runs on the TMR server and on each managed node, providing a

common framework communication across all platforms on which the Tivoli

environment works.