Building your tree

Setting up a basic consumer tree that mirrors your business structure vastly increases your ability to manage your resources efficiently. By following these steps, you gain an understanding of a consumer tree, consumers, and how to plan for the future.

1. Gather the facts.

   Before you create your consumers and build your tree, you need to know how you want to control your cluster resources. To begin the process, you need to map out your current business structure.

   1. Map out your business structure by hand.
      As a best practice, restrict the number of levels to four. For example, your business structure might have four departments (Development, Research, Finance, and QA) that each perform various business tasks:

      
   2. Prune your tree.

      Once you have a detailed diagram of your company structure, if any of your branches do not need to consume cluster resources, remove them from your diagram.

   3. Prioritize your business processes.
      1. For each high-level business process, decide which areas should receive resources first when they need them.
         If you decide that QA must have priority over everything else, and Finance likely needs resources with less urgency, you could set the order, numbering the departments 1-4:

         

         Keep in mind that you want to make sure that your business structure makes a distinction that parallels how you want to manage and distribute your resources. You might want to break out special projects that need dedicated or specialized hosts.

         Note: Your business structure and its hierarchy must reflect long-term business goals because it can be complicated to modify the tree later on.
      2. Prioritize all your business areas relative to other leaf consumers from the same branch (siblings).
         

      You now have the basic planning information that you are going to use to create your consumer tree.

2. Understand how your business structure maps to your tree.

   The business structure that you mapped out in the preceding step becomes the template to create a consumer tree. The first-level business processes become first-level consumers. The lowest area of business becomes a leaf consumer and is the consumer location where you register such things as services.

3. Understand the consumer tree.
   The following image is a graphical description of the consumer tree. The consumer tree organizes consumers into a structure that makes it easy to apply resource plans:

   
4. Recognize the default configurations.
   The default resource components that you see and work with in the cluster management console let you quickly and easily start using your cluster to run work.

   • Consumers:
     • ManagementServices (with nested child consumers SymphonyManagementServices and EGOManagementServices)
     • SampleApplications (with nested child consumers SOASamples and EclipseSamples)
     • ClusterServices (with nested child consumers SymphonyClusterServices and EGOClusterServices)
     

     Never remove the ManagementServices or ClusterServices branches, or change their consumer names, when building or modifying your tree.

5. Create your consumers.

   You have created a diagram mapping out your business structure. You have read the descriptions of the parts of the tree and understand how they interact. You are logged in to the cluster management console as a cluster administrator.

   It is difficult to reorganize your tree structure once you have created it, so preparation and planning are key. You need to create a consumer for each label on your business structure that you created in the preceding steps. If you have created user accounts and know who the consumer administrator is for each first-level consumer, you can specify those user accounts during this procedure. If not, you can assign consumer administrators later.

   1. Click Resources > Consumers.

      A list of existing first-level consumers displays. By default, you have ManagementServices, SampleApplications, and ClusterServices.

   2. Create a consumer for your most important first-level business area.

      Use the plan that you have already laid out and create a consumer with the name of that area. From the preceding example, the first consumer is "QA".

      1. Select Global Actions > Create a Consumer.
      2. Specify the name for your most important consumer.

         The most important first-level consumer in the preceding plan is "QA".

      3. Optionally, specify administrators and users now. You can also assign them later.
      4. Specify an operating system user account that is associated with this consumer.
      5. Leave the default resource groups selected.

         If you have already created more resource groups or replaced ComputeHosts with others, select as many as you would like available throughout this branch of the tree. If you do not select the ManagementHosts resource group plus at least one other group, you have insufficient resources to run your applications on this entire branch.

      6. Leave the Reclaim behavior section blank.

         Reclaim behavior is an advanced feature and must be coordinated with the resource plan settings.

      7. For all consumers (except for those in the ManagementHosts and InternalResourceGroup resource groups), ensure that Rebalance when resource plan changes or time interval changes is selected within the individual Consumer Properties dialog boxes.

         This selection ensures that when your resource plan changes according to set time intervals, the originally configured share ratios, allocations, and lend/borrow policies are reapplied and enforced across all consumer branches in the consumer tree.

      8. Click Create.
   3. In the order of the priorities you have already established, create the rest of your first-level consumers.

      For example, create "Development", "Research", and then "Finance".

   4. Once you have all your first-level consumers in the order that you want, use the tree in the cluster management console to navigate to your first first-level consumer (for example, "QA").
   5. Create all the sub-consumers for the most important first-level consumer (for example, "QA") in the order that you have prioritized them.
   6. Navigate to each sub-consumer and create required leaf consumers.
   7. Repeat this process until each branch of the tree is complete and matches the plan that you made.
   The final consumer tree follows the same structure as the business structure.

   Tip: Do not name any two consumers with the same name. In the following example, the number 2 was added to the second consumer named General to distinguish them.