Best Practices for Enterprise Scheduling

When I think of best practices for enterprise scheduling, my first thought is that they really aren’t any different than for scheduling a single server. But, there are some things you need to consider. Our focus this week is best practices for using Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise.

Cover All Operating Systems

My first questions for someone looking at enterprise scheduling are: “Do you cover all of the operating system levels you need to automate?” and “Which operating system should control the process—what percentage of jobs are IBM i versus other operating systems?” Another fundamental question is: “Which server is the most reliable for hosting your schedule for the network?” I’d say that outside of a mainframe environment, the IBM i server is the most reliable. Another benefit of using an IBM i server and Robot/SCHEDULE is that most large-scale IBM i customers are already replicating Robot/SCHEDULE to High Availability (HA) servers. (That best practice is common on this platform.)

Dedicated Scheduling Partition?

If you are using Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise on IBM i, you might consider creating a dedicated partition to run the server code. You don’t want the rest of the network of operating systems waiting on an IBM i restricted state save or a long backup. Plus, you can be more flexible on future operating system upgrades or other downtime events. Depending on the number of agents you manage with Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise, you should consider a dedicated enterprise scheduling partition.

Adding Agents

Now that you’ve settled on Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise, you need to start adding agents. You can define an agent to point to more than one IBM i server, and you’ll want to do this both for redundancy and for HA. (It provides additional stability you hope you never have to use.) Now, let’s switch to building out jobs in Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise. Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise offers Agent Environments that let you set up your security and environment needs before creating jobs. If you ever need to change anything, you change it in one spot and it impacts all the jobs for that agent. Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise offers similar reuse for return codes and command sets (common scripts). You set those up to save time and effort in the long run.

No Learning Curve

Another compelling reason to use Robot/SCHEDULE and Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise is that you have virtually no learning curve as you ramp up scheduling for Linux, UNIX, and Windows. In fact, the biggest transition might be getting the job scheduling team used to the cool graphical interface.