Who’s On Phirst

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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This week, Phurnace announced our support for WebSphere Application Server for z/OS. You can read more about it in our Press Release.

To be honest though, we have always worked on WebSphere for z/OS. However, we were unable to give it the official Phurnace stamp of approval until we ran it through our testing battery. As you know, z/OS is IBM’s mainframe operating system. Thus, for an ISV like Phurnace, procuring a z Series machine and the skills to manage it is a bit outside our skill set and budget. Not to mention the raised floor room, cooling pipes and tanks of Halon (not really, I think they finally banned that stuff).

Thankfully, we were able to secure a z/OS virtualized machine from the IBM Innovation Center in Dallas. The support we received from the team in Dallas was phenomenal. Patient and helpful, they provided us with a turnkey z/OS image with WebSphere ND installed and ready to test against. Moreover, the entire process was at no charge because we were validating that Phurnace Deliver™ would work with z/OS and WebSphere for z/OS.

We have access to the z Series system and z/OS for demonstrations. Please contact us if you would like to see it - sales@phurnace.com.

In zOS, WebSphere
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Phurnace is a Silver Sponsor next week at the IBM IMPACT 2009 conference. The conference is focused on SOA and the leveraging of WebSphere products – WebSphere application server, WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Process Server, and more. There are even going to be sessions and announcements related to IBM and Amazon and the cloud platform AWS, including some exciting news on this topic from Phurnace.

We found this to be a great event last year. It was good to connect face to face with our customers and our prospects. We generated good quality sales leads and the audience was perfect for us. I encourage any WebSphere system admins or IBM Portal customers to stop by and see us in our show floor booth or join us Monday morning for a “birds of a feather” session that will discuss how to eliminate your deployment scripts and the headaches that they present . We will be demonstrating the deployment of java apps into WebSphere, the management of updates and changes to IBM Portal and how to use Phurnace as an “on ramp” into the Amazon cloud (Amazon Web Services).

Finally, set a meeting with us if you plan to be there. If you would like to reserve a time slot or just want to let us know that you will be there for us to keep an eye out, please email jessica.gass@phurnace.com. She will make sure you connect with all of the right Phurnace people. This is a must go conference if you are a WebSphere user. If you don’t have your ticket, go online and sign up now. You shouldn’t miss this one.

In WebSphere
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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 WebSphere, WebLogic, Virtualization, troubleshoot, Configuration
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Here are a few helpful hints our developers have come up with while working with WebSphere.

Need to Make a Cell Name Change in WebSphere 6.0/6.1 Without Re-Installing WebSphere?
IBM provides a collection of sample Jacl & Jython scripts for less common administrative tasks. The scripts can be downloaded from IBM DeveloperWorks.

 

Stuck with an Annoying Cluster Name?
With Phurnace Deliver™, simply take a snapshot and globally replace the old name with the new one in the Configuration XML file. Then, use Phurnace Deliver™ to create a new Cluster with the correct name. All of your settings will be transferred to the new Cluster.

 

Comparing Raw WAS configurations
Trying to compare the raw configuration files of two different WebSphere environments? Make sure to check at the cell, node, and server scope for configuration objects. Since configurations are inherited from cells to nodes to servers, configurations can be applied to a server but the configuration XML will be missing from the server directory.

 

SIBus Startup Problems
If you encounter Service Integration Bus (SIBus) startup problems in WebSphere after restoring a configuration, you may have a GUID conflict in your SIBus database. Stop the server and delete the folder /path/to/profile/filestore/com.ibm.ws.sib. The problem is a GUID mismatch between the restored configuration and the database. Deleting this directory will make WebSphere recreate the database with the correct GUID.

 

WSADMIN Slowness
Each discrete call to WSADMIN instantiates a new JVM, which explains part of its slowness. In addition, each call is committed prior to continuing with the next step – which can cause problems if an error occurs mid-way through a script. A work around is to wrap the whole process in a transaction and roll-back in case of error.

 

WebSphere Profiles and Hostnames
When creating WebSphere profiles with the intention of federating them to a Cell, pay close attention the hostname you use. Verify that you can resolve all hostnames from all servers--both from the Node(s) to be federated and from the Deployment Manager. Setting the hostname to localhost will only work for standalone instances.

In WebSphere
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On September 26th, IBM will stop supporting WebSphere 5.1 and its various flavors. Nothing is particularly unusual about software companies ending support for aging products. But, the timing is terrible for customers who wish to upgrade to WebSphere 7.0.

IBM does provide an option for extending your support in a new “5 + 3” support policy. The policy has expanded the standard length of support to five years from three and the length of available extended support to three years from two.

Applying this new policy to WebSphere 6.1, we can expect IBM to reach end standard support on June 30, 2011. If one was to upgrade immediately to 6.1, you would have to migrate again in less than three years. Considering that most upgrades are measured in months, if not years, one could argue that three years is simply not enough time to amortize the upgrade costs. The end result: with the end of life of 5.1 happening before the general availability of 7.0, customers are feeling pressure to purchase the extended support to help them bridge to 7.0.

Moreover, the uncertainty of how long that migration will take is unnerving. Without a large investment of time and energy, one is unable to effectively estimate the migration effort. Simply put, most companies will have to leap before they look. Scary.

There is another option. Phurnace Deliver provides customers the ability to Snapshot a 5.1 instance and Deploy to a 6.1 instance. We will take your System Resources, Servers and other usual suspects, and migrate them to a 6.1 instance. Phurnace Deliver will even redeploy the Applications for you. You might find that you don’t need to rewrite any code and simply needed to move the EAR and System Resources to the new 6.1 instance. Or, you may be able to quickly identify problem areas to resolve before migration.

Either way, it’s a simple, cost effective way to have a look before you leap into an upgrade.

In WebSphere
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Just got back from IBM IMPACT 2008 show

3 things I learned about WebSphere customers:

Last week Jessica (our Marketing Manager) and I spent about 4 days doing booth duty at a conference, IMPACT 2008. I thought I would share 3 quick impressions that I got from the show, the people there, and what companies where showing off. Two quick caveats: first, since I was only talking to people who went to IMPACT, my impressions should probably not be fully extrapolated to a state of the general market; second, I was talking primarily to people who either stopped at the Phurnace booth or were hanging out at the same bars as me – so there may be some selection bias.

1. WebSphere is SO main-stream. It’s everywhere. No one industry dominates. Everyone is using WAS, and its add-on products. I knew that there were lots of folks using Portal, but what surprised me was the number of people I talked to who were currently using Process Server or were planning to. Personally, I thought adoption would be slower than that. But lots of companies seem to be embracing it.
2. There were tons of consultants. Everyone from GBS, to Perficient, Accenture, CSC, CapGemini, etc., etc., etc. Sure, they were prospecting for customers just like I was, and I get that, but doesn’t that say something about the industry that the thing we are there to see/learn/discuss is so complex that about a third of the people I talked to where consultants?
3. There were some small companies doing some pretty cool things (and not just Phurnace). For example, the people right next to us was Clear App (a competitor of CA’s Wiley) who had some interesting stuff on performance monitoring of Portal apps. And I met Michael Dag, a solo owner of a company called MQSystems. He has an interesting tool for the modeling of MQ configs and object relationships. Start-ups and early stage companies are alive and well. And they are driven by some interesting innovation.

So that’s my quick three: WebSphere -- it’s everywhere, lots of people want you to pay them to help you with it, and there is some real innovation happening in start-up land. Oh, and next year I am not staying at the Tropicana Hotel. But that’s a whole different topic.

In WebSphere
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