Mid Server Questions

[michaelrose]

Looking for some do's/don'ts and advice on our companies situation relating to our instances and discovery.

Currently, only our Prod has a mid server/Test does not/Dev does not.   A third party/consultant setup the mid server for Prod and we have a ticket in which SN is telling us we need to setup a mid server in our Test instance for them to do some testing relating to our discovery.

First question - Should we have the third party replicate the Prod mid server in Test so the server setup properly mimics Prod or is this something we can handle ourselves?   MID Server Installation - ServiceNow Wiki

Second question - Do's and Don'ts relating to putting the TEST mid server on the same VS as the Prod mid server.   My boss likes the idea of setting up a seperate VS for test and then installing the mid server on that?   Looking for justification to bring to mgt...

Third question - While we are doing it, should we set up a mid server for DEV?

We do have a second phase of our SN implementation coming up in which a different consultant will be performing.   Any advice or concerns on how we are setup that I might want to be aware of?

[Mike Allen]

I set up a lot of mid servers in my old job across all our environments.   It is not that difficult to do and the instructions take you step-by-step through it.   It is no different that installing any other program, with the exception of having to browse a config file to input data (user name / password / instance).

The only reason I'd separate the mid servers is if you had to reach different subnets that a single box could not talk to.   Multiple MID servers can run on a single box just fine.   You need multiple because the config specifies a single instance.

I would have a MID server in each environment, because each environment's deviation from prod is sometimes a source of headaches, so having the same setup in each of the three helps.

And, after all that, but the mid servers table in the clone exclude list and you should be good to go.

[poyntzj]

This is for Windows...and i followed the details in the link you have.   easy enough

What we have done is on the physical box, is create a folder for each instance

MID_Server_xxx_DEV

MID_Server_xxx_TEST

MID_Server_xxx_PROD

xxx is location

We also have DMZ ones which are suffixed with DMZ

On the servers, the folders are all identical copies

In each of these folders, edit the \agent\config.xml file

you need to change the url to the instance, possibly the username for the instance and the initial password (set as plain text which is will encrypt) and then the name

clear the mid_sys_id value at the bottom of the XML file.

go to the \agent\cont folder

edit the wrapper.conf file

around line 160, there is a section for Service Properties.

Make sure that each of the options for wrapper.name; wrapper.displayname and wrapper.description say the instance (eg, _dev or DEV at the end)

edit the wrapper-override.conf file

again, look at the windows service section and change the wrapper.name and wrapper.displayname fields.

Once done, go into a CMD prompt

goto the agent\bin folder

run InstallMID-NT.bat

[JBark]

I manage the discovery process for our instance and took this course.

ServiceNow | Training | Configuration Item Identification, Implement ServiceNow Discovery

Configuring MID servers is not difficult, plus keeping service accounts and passwords completely in-house made the paranoid very happy That course will teach you all you need, Plus you get to interact with SNow staff and partners, I was the only "customer" in a class of 9 and the insights provided were VERY useful.

I've attached a sizing chart we used to determine how many MID servers we would need for our instance. We have 3 virtual servers (dual core, 4GB ram) that run 3 MID servers each in our production environment. I only need 8 of those to run daily workstation scans, but it is handy to have that extra one to do one offs. We have no TEST MID servers and just one virtual server running 3 MIDs in DEV.

Good luck and have fun!