Who’s On Phirst

I and a few other folks from Phurnace attended the Portal Excellence Conference in San Diego this week. Some quick thoughts from the show:

• Insurance and Banking seemed to be the biggest verticals represented at the show.
• There were quite a few folks there that weren’t current Portal customers, but were considering migrating from another platform to WebSphere Portal. The most common reason they gave was nervousness about all the recent consolidation in the Portal space (i.e., Oracle acquiring BEA, OpenText acquiring Vignette, etc.)
• More talk about WCM (IBM Web Content Management) than in prior years. WCM seems to be catching on with the WAS Portal customer space.
• IBM is an excellent host at these events. Thanks guys! We had a good time.

In WebSphere Portal
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We are gearing up for a great show next week at the IBM Portal Excellence Conference in San Diego. If you are headed to the show, please stop by our session on Monday from 4:30 - 5:30PM PT in the Marina 5 Ballroom and/or visit us at Booth 13.

Also, we put together a quick video of the Greatest Moments in Software History. Have a look!

In WebSphere Portal
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Phurnace just released some new and powerful features for the management of IBM WebSphere and WebSphere Portals. In the Portal area, our product, Phurnace Deliver, can manage the auto-deployment and on-going configuration management for all of the pieces of a Portal instance (portlets, themes, skins, content, etc.) and the understandings of the interdependencies between them. This makes changing and managing Portals substantially easier than it is without Phurnace.

Brand new capabilities include a “roll-back in time” feature that allows Portal administrators to fully archive points in time and roll-back (on-demand) to a previous known state. It can fully archive all objects needed to deploy an IBM WebSphere Portal application including binaries (wars, skins, themes, etc.) and the associated configuration information.

This is a life saver for Portal administrators that have consistently complained to us that there is no concept of “state” for their portals. We hear again and again from prospects that xmlaccess alone simply doesn’t cut it to manage the constantly changing objects and configurations of their Portals.

Other cool new capabilities include more robust management and deployment of virtual Portals and a graphical representation of relationships between WebSphere objects (such as references and containment of those elements).

In WebSphere Portal, WebSphere
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We are gearing up for our next tradeshow, the IBM Portal Excellence Conference in San Diego, Oct 12 - 14, 2009. We attended a ton of great sessions last year and chatted with some really cool Portal admins at our booth. This year we have a booth and our CTO, Robert Reeves, will be doing a live demo of Phurnace WebSphere Portal® Deliver™ during our technical session. Check the website in the next few weeks for the details. This is a must attend event for any Portal admin. See you there!

In WebSphere Portal
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We had a great time last week at IBM IMPACT.  Thanks again to everyone who came to our session or stopped by the booth.  We should have a posting later this week from Robert on thoughts about the show.

If you haven't had the chance yet, take a look at our press release from last week on how we can help companies "On-Ramp" their applications to the Amazon cloud. We collaborated with teams from Amazon Web Services, IBM WebSphere Portal and Ixion, LLC to put this together. Very cool stuff...

Finally, we have a little over a week before our webinar on the state of the Data Center and the Cloud with Rachel Chalmers from the 451 Group. Join us on Thursday, May 21st, at 11AM CST to hear all about it.

In WebSphere Portal, Cloud Computing
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I know everyone hates it when the Marketing person posts a blog but we have some very interesting webinars coming up soon that I wanted to share with everyone. Please forgive the Marketing fluff as the content of these webinars will be very valuable.

WebSphere Portal Customer? - The first webinar is great for anyone using or considering using WebSphere Portal. We have a speaker from IBM, Richard Gornitsky, who is the Chief Architect for some of the largest WebSphere Portal engagements. He will give us some insight into how customers are deploying applications on Portal today. Daniel Nelson from Phurnace will explain how we can help simplify and speed up those processes. This one is coming up soon so register and get it on your calendar now!
April 30, 2009 Webinar - Help! I Need to Automate the Deployment and Configuration of My WebSphere Portal Applications.

Considering the Cloud? - Rachel Chalmers from the 451 Group will be giving a current state of tools and her big picture view and in the Data Center Automation space and how the cloud fits into that big picture. She will also discuss the "gap" that exists between Dev and IT Ops when web apps are handed off. Daniel Nelson from Phurnace will explain how Phurnace fills that "gap" with deployment automation and how we enable the on-ramping of applications into the cloud..
May 21, 2009 Webinar - The Automation Gap - Its Impact on the Data Center and the Cloud

Looking to Cut IT Costs but have Run Out of Places To Do So? We have the answer. The title and details aren't available for this webinar yet but check back soon because we have Eveyln Hubbert from Forrester joining us to talk about that exact topic.
June 18, 2009 Webinar - Title, Detials, Registration to come

In WebSphere Portal, Data Center Automation, Cloud Computing
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I thought I would provide a step by step instruction on setting up IBM WebSphere Portal 6.0. This is how we do it here at Phurnace. I thought many of you could benefit from our example.

Create Linux Virtual Image

The first step is to create a virtual image to work with. For purposes of this example, we will create an image called "wp60source". This linux image will have a static ip.

Create the Image

cd /opt/Virtual\ Machines

• Make a directory for your virtual machine. We call ours wp60source in this example

mkdir wp60source

• For linux, copy the contents of the rhel4Base image to your VM's directory

cp -rf rhel4Base/* wp60source

• Login to phurnacedev03 with the VMWare Console
• Add the virtual machine to the list
  • Go to File->Open.
  • Select Browse...
  • Double click "wp60source".
  • Select the .vmx file contained within that folder

Configure the Virtual Machine Settings

• Edit Virtual Machine Settings
  • Bump Memory to 2G
  • Add 4 GB Virtual Disk
    • Click Add, Select virtual disk and accept defaults

Configure the Virtual Machine

• Startup the Virtual Machine
• When prompted about the Network Configuration, press any key
  • Remove Configuration
  • Add Configuration.
    These are my example settings , use your own IP address.

IP                   10.1.1.158
NetMask              255.255.255.0
Default Gateway      10.1.1.1
Nameserver           10.1.1.48

• Set the Hostname
  • Applications -> System Settings -> Network
  • Click DNS
  • Change Hostname
  • Reboot

• Extend the Logical Volume
  • Applications->System Settings->Logical Volume Management
  • Under "Unitialized Entities", Find the entity and initialize it. In this example, /dev/sdb1
  • Add this entity to the VolumeGroup00
  • Go to the Volume Group Properties and extend the slider.

• Bump up the ulimit ceiling for the number of open files
  • vi /etc/security/limits.conf
  • add the following lines

*    soft    nofile   10240
*    hard    nofile   10240

Extract the Installer for WebSphere Portal 6.0

Consult Disk Image Page for help regarding Disk Images.

• Find the installation images for Portal 6.0. First consult the

cd /mnt/install/WebSphere Portal/Portal_6.0
mkdir /opt/images
cp C93MXML.taz C93N3ML.taz C93LSML.zip C93M4ML.zip  C93LUML.zip  C12YDML.zip /opt/images

• Extract each of these images in their own folder

cd /opt/images
mkdir C93MXML
cd C93MXML
unzip ../C93MXML.zip

mkdir C93MXML
cd C93MXML
tar zxvf ../C93MXML.taz
...

• Rename each of the diretories to the names provided on the Disk Image Page.
  This also verifies you grabbed the correct zips.

mv C12YDML W-Setup
mv C93MXML IL-1
mv C93N3ML IL-2
mv C93LSML IL-3
mv C93M4ML IL-4
mv C93LUML IL-5

Install Portal

In the W-Setup directory, run the installer.

./install.sh.

Choose Typical.
Provide a name of the Cell, Node,
Provide a WAS user/pass
Provide a Portal Admin user/pass
Accept defaults.

Install Patches

• You may need to free up space and delete the disc images from the base install

• Copy over the patch installer and fix paks. These are contained on the install drive under WebSphere Portal in the 6.0.1.3 update directory.

cd /mnt/install/WebSphere\ Portal/
cp -rf 6.0.1.3\ update/ /opt/images

• Extract the "WebSphere Update Installer" Installer

mkdir WasUpdateInstaller
cd WasUpdateInstaller
unzip ../6.1.0-WS-UPDI-LinuxIA32-FP0000017.zip

• Run the "WebSphere Update Installer" Installer and install to /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer

• Copy the fixpacks into the maintenance directory

cd /opt/images/6.0.1.3 update
cp *.pak /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/updateinstaller/maintenance/

• Now run the WebSphere Update Installer

cd /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/updateinstaller
./update
Relaunch for each of the .pak files

• Unzip the "Portal Update Installer" Installer

• Move the directory to /opt/IBM/WebSphere/PortalServer/updateinstaller
• Unzip the fix pak.
• Move the contained files to /opt/IBM/WebSphere/PortalServer/updateinstaller/fixpaks
• Update the passwords in /opt/IBM/WebSphere/PortalServer/config/wpsconfig.properties
• Run . ./setupCmdLine.sh from /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/bin
• Run the Portal Update Install Wizard
• Select the jar file in the fixpaks directory

In WebSphere Portal
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When designing your own custom WebSphere Portal themes and skins, after initially creating them in the Portal Admin Console and in the file system of your WebSphere Application Server, it is important to update your WebSphere Portal EAR file with your new themes and skins. Otherwise, your new themes and skins can be overwritten or deleted whenever the WebSphere Portal EAR is updated. So, what do we need to do to add our shiny new custom themes and skins to the WebSphere Portal EAR file? Unfortunately, this involves a little bit of scripting with wsadmin and EARExpander. This is all documented in the IBM online help. If you don't want to do this manually every time, you end up with a shell script for Linux or Cygwin (or similar DOS batch file) that looks something like this to update a new skin called qaThinSkin and a new theme called qaIBM:



This can be quite tedious and error-prone (and subsequently, costly) if you are constantly tweaking your skins and themes and need to move them from QA to production. This is where Phurnace WebSphere Portal Deliver can help. After you have initially created your custom skin and theme, Deliver can snapshot your WebSphere Portal configuration. Then we can use the Portal Configuration Packager Wizard to pare down the configuration to just the custom skin and theme.



Then copy your custom theme and skin to your Deliver client, keeping the same directory structure as they would be under the wps.war directory on your WebSphere Application Server:



Next we add the local directory for our themes and skins to the Deliver server profile, in the Portal tab.



Now we can make updates to the JSPs or GIFs on our Deliver client and then do a Portal Install to the WebSphere Portal application server to see the updates. You can even use our Portal Copy feature to transfer your custom themes and skins from your QA environment to your production environment. With no more time spent scripting, you can actually use your time for more important things like designing your custom skins and themes, and let Phurnace WebSphere Portal Deliver do all the deployment work for you.

In WebSphere Portal
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A Portal represents a web site that provides a single point of access to applications and information. IBM WebSphere Portal is highly complicated software that enables companies or organizations to host their own portal.

WebSphere Portal offers two main tools to help manage WebSphere Portal configuration: XMLaccess and ReleaseBuilder. Besides automation, the major benefit of XMLAccess is its ability to update pages and portlets without losing user customization. If you perform your updates via XMLAccess, any user customization to a page or a portlet is retained because the object IDs are retained. Release Builder, helps you deploy new applications from staging to production. It captures the differences between two versions of the configuration and builds a delta XML configuration file that can be imported in the production environment to represent the new deployment.

However, neither of these tools solve the problem of updating the theme or skin artifacts or updating the portlet .war. WebSphere Portal does offer a means to update the wps.ear file with the new theme or skin as well as deploy new portlets. This common task requires the administrator to learn two additional tools such as wsadmin and wpconfig.

Most WebSphere Portal sites use the Personalization features offered. Again, WebSphere Portal offers yet another tool that allows the administrator to stage personalization rules from one server to another. This tool is called pznload.

At this point, you are probably getting the sense of what is required to manage WebSphere Portal.

We are not done. Almost every WebSphere Portal deployment relies on at least one enterprise application deployed to WebSphere. Therefore, upgrades to portlets sometimes require upgrades of the Enterprise application that supports the portlet. Now, the WebSphere Portal administrator needs knowledge about WebSphere administration too.

It is easy to draw a conclustion that because WebSphere Portal encompasses so many topics, the management of WebSphere Portal is extremely difficult, especially in a fault-tolerant, scalable solution.

We at Phurnace experienced these difficulties first-hand. From a developer's point of view, this pain was the driving force behind creating a new product, Phurnace WebSphere Portal Deliver. Phurnace WepShere Portal Deliver leverages each of these tools that IBM provides internally. Phurnace utilizes the same technology and tools that a WebSphere Portal administrator does today. However, it offers additional intelligence around working with these tools, handling errors, and even working around defects in ReleaseBuilder. Finally, with Phurnace, the processes can be fully automated and after deployments are complete the user is left with a report detailing what changed. Therefore it is faster, easier and there is an audit trail that is automatically produced. With Phurnace WebSphere Portal Deliver, the administrator only has to learn a single tool and that tool will make their jobs a whole lot easier.

In WebSphere Portal xmlaccess, WebSphere Portal
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Date: Thursday, October 30, 2008
Time: 11:00CST
Presenters: Daniel Nelson, Vice President of Products, Phurnace Software

Please join us for an informative webinar that will introduce Phurnace Deliver™ for IBM WebSphere Portal®
Phurnace Deliver will automate your Portal deployments and effectively manage the changes you must constantly make to portlets, apps, themes, skins and content.

During the webinar we will discuss and demonstrate how:

• Phurnace WebSphere Portal Deliver auto-discovers dependencies, making sure that incomplete deployments are a thing of the past.
• To move Portal components seamlessly throughout your environment without scripting or manual intervention.
• To snapshot your Portal environments and discover exactly how they are configured.
• To compare environments quickly, discovering the root cause of configuration and deployment errors in minutes.
• Phurnace Deliver’s unique architecture makes migrations across Portal versions faster and easier.

Please click here to register.

In WebSphere Portal
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