Multiple instances of resource PC on same VM?

[astrid.stollberger]

​Hi - is there a way to setup 1 VM as resource PC for more than 1 Blue Prism Environment?
Background: we have a process which shall run regularly on all 3 environments (DEV, UAT, PROD).
So I'd like to avoid having to setup 1 VM per environment.
But if I try to run more than 1 Resource PC on a single VM I'm getting:
"[2019-09-06 10:35:55Z] Listener failed : Unable to start listener - is this machine already running as a Resource PC? : Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted
[2019-09-06 10:35:55Z] Will retry in 2 minutes"

Any thoughts?


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Cheers Astrid
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[james.man]

You have to be careful if you run multiple instances of a Runtime Resource on a single VM.  Things that you should consider when trying to run multiple runtimes include:

• Knowing which application is foregrounded at any time in case the process requires so
• Any surface automation techniques which require certain windows to be visible need to be showing on the screen and not covered by actions taken by other processes
• The "run mode" of any objects that are used in the processes (background, foreground vs. exclusive) which dictates whether the Process is able to run at the same time as other processes
• License usage
• CPU/RAM or other hardware limits may get exhausted if simultaneous "heavy" processes are run
• The impact on any SLAs if execution speeds drop due to running multiple processes running concurently

Generally you shouldn't mix any other environment with Production.  There could be valid reasons to combine DEV and UAT, but production should really be left on its own for reliability and stability.

The way to run multiple resource PCs on a single VM is to start them using the command line command and specifying different ports for each one.  The default port if you don't specify anything is 8181.  This explains why you see the "listener failed" message as you are trying to start more than one digital worker on port 8181.

In the installation folder, use the command "automate.exe /resourcepc /public /port 8182", "automate.exe /resourcepc /public /port 8183" etc to start runtime resources on different ports on the same machine.  Other flags such as /user {username} {password} or /sso may be needed depending on how your environment is setup.

If you need more guidance on how to use the command line to start Runtime Resources, you can look at the in-product help file and search for "command line" as the search term.

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James Man
Senior Product Consultant
Blue Prism
Asia/Hong_Kong
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