Month: September 2019

MIM 2016: Guidelines for scheduling Sync run jobs

/ Ike Ugochuku / Leave a comment

You know it was not much of issue to schedule jobs in FIM 2010 or MIIS or ILM, just put your Full Import one after the other or in parallel and they run fine. We ignored some of the unwritten best practice recommendations of Msft, well all that changed in MIM 2016. its really requires you to follow best practice else your jobs will be stepping on each other. Lets look at some of best practice recommendations, I have heard and used

  1. Avoid the combo profile like the “Delta Import and Delta Sync” or “Full Import and Full Sync”. Those profiles result in a few deltas (2-3%) not being processed. They were actually supposed to have been deprecated in one of the versions but I guess they were left in “limbo”.
  2. The multi step run job is not the best. The next step does not wait for the previous step to finish before it kicks off, in some cases depending on the connector this may result in the next step failing and the whole run job been abandoned. Speaking about run job finishing, the hand-off between the sync engine and the management agent is not instantaneous because you see “completed” on the GUI, there may be a few micro seconds after that before closure is fully completed.
  3. Based on (2), the recommendation is to run the your steps as separate jobs one at a time. So JOB 1 – MA1 Delta Import, Job 2 – MA1 Delta Sync.
  4. Based on (2), the recommendation is to allow some seconds between each job. So in you run script put a pause of 5-10 seconds between every job.
  5. Based on (2), I have seen that for the SQL connector in MIM 2016, if you run a two step job with say Step1-Full Import and Step2-Delta Sync and there are errors (maybe 2 errors) in your Full Import, the delta Sync will not run. Another case for (3) and (4).
  6. ECMAs should not be run in parallel, they will step on each other, they seem to run in the same runspace. OOB Mas can be safely run in parallel, although not recommended for your normal operational run, if you have a one off situation you can run OOB MA in parallel, but if you have an ECMA, then wait till the OOBs have finished before you run your ECMA.