Replication fundamentals through customer examples

A replicationEZ masterclass webcast

Managing replication across several IBM Domino servers can be overwhelming and may result in limiting oneself to reactive measures. As administrators, we need to establish a pro-active protocol to ensure that everything is setup correctly in order to prevent as many issues as possible. Managing replication is critical to administering any domino environment, where erroneous replication results in significant cost for the organization and confusion for the user.

In this presentation, we will focus on practical solutions using the latest features of replicationEZ and other Ytria tools for scenarios encountered at customer sites. Through these, you’ll learn how to discover issues, understand why they occurred, resolve ensuing problems, and prevent future ones from arising:

• Ensure your replicas are in sync and immediately find critical inconsistencies.
• Differentiate between different classes of inconsistencies and learn what to do about them.
• Find out what the actual differences are between your replicas.
• Understand why these problems happened in the first place and resolve them.
• Track documents to understand where they came from and see your replication setup working (or not!) from your documents’ reference point.
• Get a unique overview of the nature of replication for all replicas of a given database and learn to quickly find where it may have gone wrong.
• Trace problems back to a faulty setup, understand where it went wrong, and correct it.
  Get a deep overview of connection documents to understand what will happen to your databases when replication occurs.
• Learn to use the graphical charts generated from actual replication history entries.
• And more!

Time-Stamped outline

Analyzing your environment (04:13)

Main Interface: see what is replicating and where? (04:30)

• Grouping by the number of replicas found (06:30)
• Discovering duplicate replicas (07:10)
• Adding properties in the grid (07:34)

Replication History: when and how did replication take place? (08:34)

• Populate grid with replication history of a given application and all its replicas (09:20)
• Replication History Chart for a single database (10:20)
• Automation: exporting the replication history for multiple databases (13:20)

Ensuring replicas are consistent(14:25)

Note Counters: How many notes in each replica? (15:07)

• Inconsistent Counts: was replication successful? (16:27)
• Example: Service Desk application
• Replicate missing documents via Console Command (19:08)
• Compare replicas’ documents with scanEZ’s Replication Auditor (20:00)
• Find Selective replication formulas (Replication Settings) to solve replication issues (23:20)

Compare ACLs (25:15)

• Finding & resolving an ACL issue (25:15)
• Resolve inconsistency by copying ACLs (27:45)

Find Conflicts (28:33)

• Find a huge heap of conflicts using Conflict Counter (28:55)
• Analyze for explanations of large amount of conflicts (30:01)
• Resolve conflicts in scanEZ (30:30)

Compare Agents (31:10)

• Find incorrect property settings: Run On (31:45)

Note Tracker (32:45)

• Use scanEZ’s Post Replication Auditor to locate ghost documents (33:07)
• Find out who edited the affected database at a specific time (35:25)

Managing replication settings (40:55)

Seeing a Global Picture of Replication & Investigating Affected Databases (41:17)

• Examples of Discover Replicas Charts (45:50)

Connection Documents (48:30)

• Use Connection Document Analyzer to see how a database replicates (48:30)

Cluster Analyzer (50:30)

• Create replicas (51:37)

Note: Use F11 to toggle between displaying horizontal and vertical column titles in the grid.

Selected Databases Panel (53:10)

• Enable PIRC on a database’s replicas to prevent Ghost Documents (55:28)
• Selective Replication Formulas (56:00)