Who’s On Phirst

I love talking to customers. It makes product planning so much easier if all you do is listen to them and give them what they want. And from the looks of things, most all of our large WebSphere customers are planning to or have already moved to WebSphere Virtual Enterprise (VE).

Quick synopsis of VE (or the product-formerly-known-as OO or XD; IBM has played around with the name more than Prince). Virtual Enterprise allows WebSphere clusters to dynamically allocate resources to applications based on a series of policies, either for service levels or health statistics. The VE on-demand router can gather utilization information and then implement topology or prioritization changes. It’s pretty cool.

There are some challenges though. Just like anything in WebSphere (or middleware in general), it’s a bear to configure and maintain. It’s critical to implement the policies correctly and unlike static configuration where it’s often immediately evident if something isn’t right, with policy based configuration everything can look perfectly fine, but under load the environment might behave quite a bit differently than anticipated -- if the policies aren’t set up exactly right.

About 80% of our Fortune 500 customers that use WebSphere are either currently using VE or have concrete plans to move to it in the next six to nine months. That’s pretty compelling. That’s also why we have extended our products to support VE. With our VE support we help insure that our customer’s environments are set up exactly the way they want them and eliminate a lot of the complexity and heart burn that comes with the added functionality. So, rest assured: go ahead and move to VE, we have your back.

 

In WebSphere VE
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Both WebSphere Virtual Enterprise (VE) and ND 7.0 have the ability to remotely stop and start Node Agents, install WebSphere on remote servers and a whole host of handy remote activities. To perform these actions, WebSphere takes advantage of Tivoli Remote Execution and Access (RXA).

Luckily, you too can take advantage of RXA to manage your remote servers. Below, I’ll show you how to create a very simple Java class that will connect to your local windows machine and perform a directory listing.

First, you will need to create a new Eclipse project and add the following JAR to your Build Path as an external library: ${WAS_INSTALL_DIR}/plugins/com.ibm.ws.prereq.rxa.jar.

Second, create a new class and add the following main method.

      public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

            RemoteAccess ra = new LocalWindowsProtocol();
            ra.beginSession();
      }

At this point, you can really take advantage of the RemoteAccess object to gather information about your Local Windows host, or to run commands, manage processes, you name it. For example, the following lines added to the main method will perform a directory listing on your Local Windows host:

            ProgramOutput programOutput = ra.run("dir");
            String stdOut = programOutput.getStdout();

Of course, you might want to get STDERR while you’re at it…

Finally, RXA is not just limited to a Local Windows host. Here is an example on how to connect to a Remote SSH host:

            String username = new String("root");
            String strPassword = new String("p4ssw0rd");
            byte[] bPassword = strPassword.getBytes();
            ra = new SSHProtocol(username, bPassword);
            ra.setHostname("myhost.domain.com");
            ra.beginSession();

If you are going to be running a series of identical commands on a bunch of different servers, all with different OS types, I would recommend using the Factory design pattern to generate a RemoteAccess object of the correct Protocol type. Below is a list of the Protocol objects. As you can see, you have a very broad assortment.

AS400Protocol
LocalAS400Protocol
LocalUNIXProtocol
LocalWindowsProtocol
REXECProtocol
RSHProtocol
SSHProtocol
UNIXProtocol
WindowsProtocol

In WebSphere VE, WebSphere 7.0, Tivoli Remote Execution and Access
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