Websphere Migration from was7 to was9 - migration

Planning to Migrate the Websphere from 7.0 to 9 and 8.5 to 9.
Can anyone help me getting the detailed Process
Migration here is "In place". (Migration will be done on the same servers, where the old Installation are in)
if at all any migration tools need to be used, please provide the clear info on them.
any documental references, or any video references for the questioner is appreciated.
OS used : RHEL
CUrrent version: WAS 7x and 8.5
Migrating to : WAS 9.0

It sounds like you're in the very beginning stages of doing this migration. Therefore, I highly recommend you take some time to plan this out, especially to figure out the exact steps you'll be taking and how you'll handle something going wrong. For WebSphere, there is a collection of documents from IBM that discuss planning and executing the upgrade. Look around there for documentation on the tools and step by step guides for different kinds of topologies. The step by step guide for an in place migration of a cell is here.
You should make sure to take good backups before you start the process so you can restore back to before the migration if you need to.
In addition to doing the upgrade, an important part is to also make sure your applications are going to work on the new version if you haven't already. IBM provides this tool to scan applications and identify potential issues that developers will have to fix. There is documentation for the tool at that link as well.

If you are in the planning phase, I'd strongly suggest you to consider migrating to WebSphere Liberty instead of traditional WAS v9. All these migration tools (toolkit for binaries, Eclipse migration toolkit) support both migration scenarios.
Choosing Liberty might be a bit more work at the beginning, but you will gain more deployment flexibility and speed up future development. Liberty is also much better fitted for any cloud/containers environments, as it is much more lightweight, so in the future, if you would like to move to containers, it would be much easier.
Check this tutorial Migrate traditional WebSphere apps to WebSphere Liberty on IBM Cloud Private by using Kubernetes, although it shows the steps to migrate to Liberty on ICP, beginning is the same - analyzing of the application whether they are fit for Liberty and migrating. If you don't have access to IBM Cloud or ICP, you can use stand alone version of the Transformation Advisor that was released recently - IBM Cloud Transformation Advisor.
Having said all that, some apps include old or proprietary traditional WebSphere APIs and in that case it may be easier and cheaper to temporary migrate them to WAS v9, and modernize in the future.

Related

OpenShift Origin vs OpenShift Enterprise

I'm searching for a main difference between OpenShift Origin and OpenShift Enterprise. I know that the first is open source and the latter is the commercial version. Have OpenShift Enterprise got other features compared to the open source version?
Thanks in advance.
Update 3/21/2018: If you find this old answer of mine in the future, Enterprise is called "OpenShift Container Platform" now.
The community version goes faster, but with change comes some risk. If you would like to be an early adopter Origin could be your choice. Note: support is best effort by the community, but I have found very helpful people on IRC and on the project's github page.
Link: https://github.com/openshift/origin
The enterprise version has the advantage of professional support for your money. While you won't get features as early, in exchange there is focus on stability and streamlining. This may be important for enterprises. Some solutions / examples may not work exactly the same way. For example application templates, utilities come as part of packages for RHEL users. It also comes with some entitlements for things like RHEL and CloudForms integration.
I tried installing a one master, one node small cluster with both, and found them just as good.
In short, stability or early adoption. Oh, and bugfixes.
Personally I prefer to go with Origin, as you can monitor the state of the project yourself and you are not forced to jump on every coming train. Update when suitable.
OpenShift Origin is the open source community version of OpenShift Enterprise. In order to understand what this means, you need to understand what open source software is - computer software developed via a competitive collaborative model from many individual sources. Origin updates as often as open source developers contribute via git, a version control system, sometimes as often as several times per week.
OpenShift Enterprise 3integrates with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is tested via Red Hat's QA process in order to offer a stable, supportable product for customers who want to have their own private or onsite cloud. Enterprise might update around every six months, maintaining stabilization across minor updates. Providing timely professional support for each query they have from installation/POC to the production.

Set up distributed index using Hibernate Search and Lucene

Our application is using Hibernate Search for indexing some of its data. The application is running on two JBoss EAP 6.2 application servers for load distribution and failover. We need changes made on one machine to be immediately visible on the other. The index is a central part of the application and needs to be consistent with the database data. Completely rebuilding it takes a long time so it is important that it remains intact even in the case of a server crash. Also, the index is expected to grow too large to keep all of it in memory.
Our current solution is to use the standard filesystem directory with a shared filesystem (NFS) and the JGroups backend to ensure that only one server writes to a given index at any time. This works more or less, but sometimes we have problems with index updates taking very long (up to 20 seconds) or failing completely. Due to some other reasons we need to migrate away from the currently used file system, so we are evaluating alternatives for the current setup.
One thing we tried is the Infinispan directory with a file cache store for persistence, but we had some problems there regarding OutOfMemoryErrors (see also my post in the Infinispan forums https://developer.jboss.org/thread/253732). Also, performance was still not acceptable in our first tests (about 3 seconds for an index update with two clustered servers set up on my developer machine), though that may be due to configuration issues.
I think this is not such an uncommon requirement, but I couldn't find much information on best practices to implement it.
Who has experiences with similar setups? Does the Infinispan directory work for you? Can anybody suggest a working configuration or how to proceed to arrive at one? What alternatives have you tried and which work?
You need to be careful about which versions are being used. The Infinispan version which is bundled within JBoss EAP is not intended (i.e. tested as extensively as for other purposes) for storing the Lucene index.
When JBoss EAP 6.2 was released, the bundled Infinispan was considered good to go for the internal needs of the application server, but as you might have discovered, the feature of index storage was having at least some performance issues.
In recent developments of Infinispan we applied many improvements to the index storage feature, fixing some bugs and getting very significant performance improvements out of it. I would hope you could be willing to try Infinispan 7.2.0.Beta1 ?
All of these improvements are also being backported to JBoss Data Grid, version 6.5 will make them available as a supported product. Note this feature of storing an Hibernate Search index wasn't supported before - it is going to be a new feature of JDG 6.5.
Modules from JDG 6.5 will be compatible with JBoss EAP, you'll just have to make sure you'll use the Infinispan build provided by JDG and not the one meant for internal usage of EAP.
Performance improvements are still being worked on. It's much better already - especially compared to that older version - but we won't stop working on that yet so if you could try latest bleeding edge versions of Infinispan 7.2.x (another release is scheduled for tomorrow), I'd highly appreciate your feedback to keep pushing it.

What are the advantages of using OSGi at target side in a Remote Software Provisioning System?

I am developing a Remote Software Provisioning system that should be able to handle all deployment, installation, un-installation and upgrades of software components. Software can be in any language (java, .net, c/c++ etc) and target side can be PC, embedded systems and smart phones.
I have found Apache ACE as good candidate for developing this system.
I want to know if there is any advantage/necessity of using OSGi at target side as Apache ACE can do software provisioning to non-OSGi targets as well.
Having a modular framework like OSGi at the client side is a huge advantage when doing remote management, because it gives you much insight into what's happening inside - installed bundles, dependencies, states of the bundles, available services etc. This helps a lot when you have to solve a problem remotely. Another advantage is that OSGi basically forces programmers to develop proper modular and dynamic systems, which makes (remote) updating much easier.
So, if you have to decide now what language and framework to use for the client side, I strongly recommend OSGi for the embedded and mobile clients. For the PCs (I guess you mean desktop PCs?) this is probably not the best choice - it depends a lot what you want to achieve there. If you want to install MS Office remotely OSGi won't bring you forward ;)
However, if you already have existing programs at the client side and are discussing whether to convert them to OSGi, I would recommend to investigate some time first to see whether they can be converted easily. Some software packages could give you a lot of trouble converting to OSGi, not because OSGi is complex, but because the program itself is not modular and has a lot of assumptions about the static nature of the environment (e.g. nothing ever disappears, parts of the system never get updated etc.). The irony in the matter is that these are exactly the programs which will give you most trouble later anyway no matter which remote provisioning system you chose.
If you have OSGi at some of the targets be sure to use a remote provisioning system which gives you access to the full OSGi functionality and not only the most basic and simple install and update functions. I haven't yet used Apache ACE, but I have experience with another provisioning system - mPower Remote Manager. Here are some snapshots from the documentation which can give you a feeling what is possible with OSGi as a base - you can draw your own conclusions whether it will be useful for your case or not.
I've given some examples in the other question you asked:
What are the non-osgi targets with which Apache ACE can work
You can write your own management agent that talks to the ACE server and installs artifacts. There actually are a couple of places where you could hook in your own code and protocol. Is there a concrete language/environment you're thinking of using, or are you just exploring the possibilities right now?
Well, the advantages of OSGi haven't changed, so for that I can refer you to the standard page.
To be a bit more constructive, I'll read the question as 'Should I bother converting my application to OSGi, as it is not necessary for ACE?'
I think that depends on what 'kind' of updating mechanism you're after. If you have a monolithical application (at least from the provisioning perspective) which you deploy and update only as a whole (Like an iOS app) then there isn't much to gain for provisioning purposes by using OSGi.
For the rest I can tell you the same as I tell anybody else: Converting an application to OSGi isn't hard, but modularizing code can be a nightmare, but something you'll need to face at some point, OSGi or not. If your code is modularized already, using OSGi should be a piece of cake.

Suggestions for software to ease setting up a build server

I'm currently setting up a new build server and I'm interested in any suggestions the community may have about software such as Hudson or CruiseControl.NET that may simplify and add additional value to the build process.
Previously I had a build server set up using custom batch files which would run msbuild and other such tools and these were triggered by subversion hooks to allow for a continuous builds to be done per branch. The idea was that eventually we would also execute automated tests and/or static analysis although we never really got that far. This server also acted as our source code repository, a test machine for web project builds, and a web server for custom dashboard and portal for developers on the team.
At this point my thoughts are to separate some of the responsibilities of the old build server and at least a Build Server which is responsible only for creating builds, a web server which is responsible for acting as the intranet style dashboard site for developers, and perhaps an additional web server as the Subversion repository. If it turns out to be better or easier to keep the Subversion code on the same server as SvnServe then I'll probably opt to place the Subversion repository on the web server but still keep the build server separate. Having no personal experience with any of the popular build server and CI solutions out there I'm curious how CruiseControl.NET, Hudson or other solutions would fit into this type of configuration. It appears that both of CC.NET and Hudson have web interfaces for example but the documentation doesn't clearly layout how this plays out with different hardware/system configurations so I'm not sure if either requires the web portion to be on the build server itself or not.
As far as technologies I'm dealing with .NET/C# based code which is a mix of Web/WinForms/WPF and we use a few separate Subversion repositories to host these projects. Additionally it would be nice to support Visual FoxPro and Visual Source Safe for some legacy applications. I would also like to get more team members involved in monitoring builds and would like to eventual have developers create build setups for their own projects as well with as much simplicity as possible. Also I should mention that I have no experience setting up a Java based web application in IIS but I do have quite a bit of experience setting up and managing ASP.NET applications so if that may make .NET based products more favorable unless I can be convinced otherwise.
UPDATE (after researching Hudson): After all the recommendations for Hudson I started looking into what is involved to get it up and running on my two Windows 2008 servers. From what I can gather the web portion (master) would run on my webserver but it seems that IIS isn't supported so this would greatly complicate things since I want to host it on the same machine as my other web applications. On the build server, I would be installing a second copy of Hudson that would act as a slave and only perform builds that are delegated to it by the master. To get this to work I would be installing Hudson as a Windows Service and would also need to install some unix compatibility utilities. Unfortunately the UnxUtils download link appears to be broken when I checked as well so I can't really move forward until I get that resolved. All of this is really sounding just as complex if not more complex than installing CruseControl.NET. For now this unfortunately leaves me to looking into CruiseControl.NET and TeamCity.
UPDATE (about TeamCity): After looking into TeamCity a little closer I realized that at least the server portion is also written in Java and is deployed in a manner very similar to Hudson. Fortunately it appears that Tomcat can be used to host servlets inside IIS although I can't find a good straight forward guide to describe how to actually do accomplish this. So skipping that for now I looked further when I ran into what looks like what might be a major snag.
TeamCity Professional edition only
supports TeamCity Default
Authentication and does not support
changing the authentication scheme.
Since windows authentication is likely the direction we will want to go, it's now looking like it might be back to evaluating CruiseControl.NET or possibly Hudson if I can get my hands on the UnxUtils and also find out more about how I can host the dashboard portion of Hudson within my existing IIS configuration. Any pointers?
UPDATE (about Jenkins): I ended up experimenting enough with Hudson that I ended up with a reasonable build server setup that I'm happy with and that can be extended to do much more if I need. Of course I went the rout of converting to Jenkins once Oracle took over Hudson and Jenkins is what I'm using today with little bits of powershell to help tie things together. I'm very happy with this approach right now and besides being Java based, Jenkins has quite a bit of support for other development environments such as .NET and MSBuild.
I'd vote for TeamCity here. Its is very, very easy to get stood up and running, integrates with all your .NET stuff without any trouble. The builds themselves are run by agents which can be on the build server or another machine depending on requirements--they could even be on a machine running an entirely different OS on a different network in a different country.
I highly recommend using Hudson. Not only will it allow you to build .NET applications on a continual basis, but you can also run code analysis and unit tests as well. It's easy to install (just deploy a WAR file to a web server such as Tomcat) and has many configuration options. There is also a large number of plugins available that you can use, many written by other Hudson users. Best of all, it is free and actively supported.
For our decision making process we started with following overview.
http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CC/CI+Feature+Matrix
Our main objective was java, easy to configure/use even after nobody created a job for 6 months. We moved away from a old version of Cruise Control, since nobody really knew how to use it. Some of the commercial products are nice if you want to go beyond just continuous integration. Have a look and decide for yourself.
Be careful, I don't know how up to date this matrix is. So some of the projects might have implemented more functions right now.
An interesting alternative could be Jira studio by Atlasian. If you use the hosted version you don't have much on support issues and it comes with subversion, bamboo, and goodies (jira+greenhopper, confluence, crucible, fisheye). http://www.atlassian.com/hosted/studio/
I agree with Wyatt Barnett. TeamCity is the best choice. It is very easy to configure and use. Moreover, TeamCity has a Free Professional Edition. Previously we used CruiseControl.NET on our project. This is also a powerful tool, but it is very complicated and hard to understand.
What s.ermakovich said: Both TeamCity and Hudson separate the web UI from build agents. You shouldn't need to install IIS on a build agent. You'd need to install a JVM and the agent software on any build node - very straightforward.

Glassfish in a production environment?

Do you use Glassfish 2 or v3 in a production environment?
Do you find it robust?
Have you ever been able to find a complete set of documentation?
What do you do when you find that Glassfish ignores J2EE standards, like class and anotation scanning?
Glassfish is Sun's reference standard for a J2EE app server. V3 supports the new 3.1 standard. However, it is only a preview. It is currently scheduled to be released on Dec 10, 2009. Of course, it can always be dangerous to be a very early adopter in a production environment. Currently V3 doesn't support JMS or clustering, for example, but they should be in the final release.
I've used V2 in production for about 3 years and I personally like it. The web admin console makes it very easy to manage (http://localhost:4848, admin, adminadmin), and the performance is good. Here's one example, where someone benchmarked Glassfish: Blog. Of course, you should search for more examples and your YMMV. Here's a Sun document for Glassfish to help Tomcat User.
One last thing that I would add is that Sun ships, and integrates, both Tomcat and Glassfish in their Java IDE Netbeans so you can easily switch between the two app servers to test your particular app.
GlassFish Server V3 or V2 can be used in production environments but the number of users should be less than 1500. Its not very robust and scalable during high load. If used for simple applications GF works perfectly fine, as it is the reference implementation of Java EE standards by Sun which only server to be a guide to other vendors of application servers.
For more complex and high load applications, its better to go to IBM WebSphere Application Server. That's the most robust app server I have seen in my 15 yrs of experience.
Do I use GF in production? no.
Do I find it robust? yes, but I do not tax it very hard.
Have I ever found a complete set of documentation? I think so... the GlassFish v2.1 docs and the GlassFish v3 docs (http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/prod/gf.entsvr.v3?l=en&a=view)
What do I do when GlassFish ignores the J2EE standards? I file an issue here: https://glassfish.dev.java.net/issues/
Do I use in production? Yes. (Now, using 3.0.1)
Is it robust? Yes. But my point of view is from someone that likes to follow the server's developers community and can try some tricks.
What about documentation? The official one is really good, and the developers blogs are a great plus (http://blogs.oracle.com/theaquarium/). What is maybe far from other communities, at the moment, is the collective experience material (like forums), but I think the mail lists are good enough (http://glassfish.java.net/public/mailing-lists.html).