Who’s On Phirst

Official blog of Phurnace Software.

Tag >> Configuration

Posted by: Jessica Gass on

Today we announced a great new feature for Phurnace Deliver™ - the Configuration Viewer. With this feature, Phurnace is providing not just system administrators but also business managers an easily viewable, graphical representation of the applications, components, and resources running on web application servers including how they all interrelate.

Here are a few ways to check it out:

In Configuration
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Posted by: Jessica Gass on

Are You Tired of Having to Troubleshoot One Server at a Time?
Are you making necessary updates in a serial fashion? Phurnace Deliver™ can perform multiple Snapshots and Updates at once. So, you can Snapshot and Update all of your Application Servers at the same time. Let’s hear it for multi-threaded applications!

Need to Troubleshoot Application Server Configuration Problems?
How can Phurnace Deliver™ help troubleshoot my application server configuration problems?

Use Deliver to take baseline Snapshots of your “trouble free” application server configurations. Then when problems occur use Phurnace Deliver's™ “Compare Configurations” feature to quickly view all changes between the baseline Snapshot and the current configuration.

For example, your problem configuration might show parameter values that have been changed or a new application that has been deployed on the server. Once you have determined the problem Phurnace Deliver's™ “Install” feature can quickly apply the necessary changes to your application server.

Enhancing your Virtualization Initiative
The Virtualization trend is being driven by hardware cost savings and the reduction of time spent on setting up and managing applications. With Phurnace Deliver™, we help you take your virtualization to the next level.

With Virtualization today you are required to have a library of server images that you bring up and down depending on the changing demands in your organization. Perhaps during peak times you have more of the transaction processing servers online, but at night it is better to have more servers working on batch jobs. With virtualization you are able to have much higher utilization of your infrastructure, therefore saving you money on the management and time spent on server provisioning.

Phurnace Deliver™ takes those same value propositions and brings them to the application layer. With Phurnace Deliver™ you can dynamically allocate applications to the up and running app servers as well as automate the set up of cluster size, memory allocation, or hundreds of other parameters. Now with Phurnace Deliver™, you can dynamically take applications off of a cluster to free up resources for more important applications and then bring them back online after the peak load time has passed.

A common use case example:
Imagine that Denise is responsible for a medium sized server environment of 100 application server JVMs. On those JVMs are 30 applications, running in a variety of topologies. At peak load times there are 5 applications that are critically important. Denise would like a way to dynamically add server capacity to those applications. Right now Denise could manually add and delete applications from the various clusters, but doing that is very time consuming and error-prone. The environment most likely is complex, with a series of virtual server images with the applications deployed with an array of different configurations -- but with that number of applications and servers, it is too resource intensive to build a server image of every permutation. Denise can’t feasibly take full advantage of the virtualization.

With Phurnace Deliver™ the story is fundamentally different. With Phurnace Deliver™, Denise can decide to add or delete an application from a cluster on the fly and have all of the changes take place in real-time; no server down time and executed in an entirely automated process. This allows her to scale the capacity of her applications up and down depending on the resource demand: making better use of her servers and delivering improved overall performance. Now, that is the true promise of virtualization. Don’t go only half way, extend the benefits of virtualization all the way to the application layer – with Phurnace Deliver™.

Secure Your Phurnace Deliver™ Artifacts
How can I use my source control system to secure my Phurnace Deliver™ artifacts?

 

  • Within the “Deliver Navigator” view right-mouse click on your project and select “Team” and then “Share Project…” from the popup menus.

  • From the “Share Project” wizard select either “SVN” or “CVS” to specify your source control system. Press the NEXT button.

  • Enter the URL and credentials required to connect to your source control system. Press the FINISH button and your project along with all your snapshots and server profiles will be saved and versioned within your source control system.


WebSphere Process Server headaches?
Phurnace Deliver™ can help you manage your WebSphere Process Server too. Just use the Template="defaultProcessServer" attribute for your Server's elements when creating them.  Phurnace Deliver™ can help you manage any application based on WebSphere, including WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Portal Server.  Check the "About" section in the Admin Console to determine which version of WebSphere you are targeting.

WebLogic Application Versioning
Tired of having to guess what versions of what applications you have installed on WebLogic? Try attaching version numbers and a pointer to the person who made the changes to the "Description" attribute on each object as you deploy them to make sure that you keep you environments in sync.

In WebSphereWebLogicVirtualizationtroubleshootConfiguration
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Posted by: Robert Reeves on

[SCM]? We ain't got no [SCM]. We don't need no [SCM]. I don't have to show you any stinking [SCM]!"

--Your Development Manager (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre)


Software Configuration Management (SCM) is probably the most misunderstood and misapplied concept in development today. Let's take some time to clear up a few misconceptions.

Misconception: SCM is source control

Simply having a Subversion respository does not mean you now how an SCM process. The source is not the final product of your project; and that's what SCM is all about: getting the right product to the right customer. It's the artifacts that result from building the source.

Of course, having a repository for source code is a necessity, but it certainly is not the end point.


Misconception: SCM is builds

Your customer doesn't want source (usually.) What they want is a final product that they can consume, install, test, use. But, a build isn't the final product. You see, just because you have, say, a series of dist directories littered with *-ejb.jar files or even a final EAR file, it's not a final product. Those artifacts have to be in a usable format for the customer. For desktop software, that's an installer. But, for Java Enterprise software, your best bet is Phurnace Deliver.

Your build should produce not only compiled binaries and a README.txt but also a mechanism that allows your customer to consume the build outputs. Simply because the code was checked out and compiled in by Build Forge, does not mean you have SCM. It means you didn't break the build. You must provide a mechanism for reliable and repeatable deployments for your customers.

Misconception: SCM is release management

So, you have your code checked into a VCS, builds are creating something usable for the customer. Now, if you just put it on the FTP server, you're done! Nope. Even if you have a series of directories versioned with codenames (failed engineering projects are my favorite: Edsel, Hindenburg, Titantic, TiVo), you have no method for tracking back to your VCS for bug fixes.

Consider this: Customer A gets a release on Monday. On Wednesday, they find some bugs they need fixed. No problem. Johnny fixed them on Tuesday and you have a build already on the FTP server. But, what Johnny neglected to mention was the uber-buggy experimental code he checked in along with the bug fix. Customer A can't even verify that they bugs where fixed because the new release won't even start. Bummer.

 An SCM process that was able to tie code chnages to bugs would have prevented this problem. At the very least, a change log must come from your build system and be manually reconillied with the bug list. This will prevent suprises at release time.

 

 

In TipsConfiguration
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Posted by: Jessica Gass on

We are pleased to announce that Phurnace's flagship product, Phurnace Deliver™ is now directly integrated with IBM® Rational® Build Forge®. We invite you to hear all about it in our upcoming webinar - Accelerating the Software Development to Deployment Lifecycle Are you ready for one process to compile, build, deploy and configure your applications?

In this webinar, we will show you how to do that with IBM® Rational® Build Forge® and Phurnace Deliver™ products. We will explore how to use Build Forge and Deliver together to have a uniform, fully automated build and deployment process without the use of scripts or manual intervention. We will discuss how to use the combined products to check-out, build, deploy, and configure your JavaEE applications automatically. In addition, we will discuss how to preview configuration changes, keep logs of configuration and code deltas, compare configurations across servers, as well as how to manage the sometimes chaotic process of building and deploying complex enterprise applications.

Date: Friday, May 9, 2008
Time: 2:00PM - 3:00PM CST
Location: Online
Presenters: Leigh Williamson, Distinguished Engineer, Rational Software Architecture and Development, IBM & Daniel Nelson, Vice President of Products, Phurnace Software
Registration: Please register here to reserve your space.

We hope to see you there!

In DeploymentConfigurationBuild Forge
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Posted by: Larry Warnock on

I just read a blog by Aziz Gilani about “Enterprise 2.0” and his take on how enterprises will respond to the web 2.0 technologies and it’s new approaches. I think it was quite insightful and I agree with him when he comments on some of the basic assumptions by Forrester Group. Aziz writes "Having spent the past 8 years either working with CIOs or within the enterprise I can honestly say that no company will come out and say something along the lines of 'I really need some Web 2.0 in here. Where is my checkbook?' They are more likely to unwittingly stumble into Web 2.0 technology based on improvements to their end to end processes". He is dead on. Web 2.0 is not a defined category like CRM or ERP was and there isn’t one monolithic vendor pushing the concept. It is a bottom-up trend with hundreds of vendors (including free open source tools) that are making it all possible.

He also goes on to mention that configuration of the ever-expanding list of applications will continue to be a huge challenge. Again, dead on. We here at Phurnace see that every day as we talk to customers and prospects. The IT ops and software development tools today talk about “configuration and deployments”, but more often than not, they state “place current deployment process here”. That is the PROBLEM. The current process used by Global 2000 companies is error-prone, cumbersome and often laden with scripts that are fragile or in constant need of attention.

Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are here indeed, but don’t lose sight of the plumbing. Deployment and configuration management should remain top of mind. Because aren’t we sort of at “Infrastructure 4.0” and it still isn’t simple?

-Larry Warnock

In Web 2.0DeploymentConfiguration
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