hardware requirements for NServiceBus - nservicebus

We are in the process of planning a POC for NServiceBus. I am trying to figure out what hardware requirements should be considered when deploying an ESB. Any general suggestions would be great. Thanks.

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Debugging service bus based .NET applications

Lot of developers using service bus to integrate some parts of an application. It doesn't matter which platform do you use for service bus. For example, it could be Azure Service Bus Queue which integrates web application and cloud service.
It's interesting how you working with such apps locally. Do you install Azure Service Bus on each local developer station? Or maybe you use some test messages queue on server for all developers? Or even have a mock for queue?
It would be fine to see how experienced guys solves this problem in real world application. Any comments would be helpful.
Thank you!
Would the read me in the NServiceBus.Azure.Samples help?

Servicebus for Windows Server vs NServicebus vs Mule ESB

I have been looking for a comparison between newly released servicebus for windows server, NServicebus and Mule ESB. Requirement is to develop .NET based real-time data integration solution using publisher/subscriber communication pattern.
Idea is to transfer protobuf serialised data messsages over the servicebus.But, it would be great if any of these support file transfers too as we have varied volumes and various kinds of data sources.
I am not sure which one would be a better option to go with.
Really, Azure Service Bus isn't a direct competitor to NServiceBus and Mule ESB. It is closer to a message broker (like ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ) than to an integration platform. It does have a couple of features beyond simple messaging such as web service proxy and some nice mobile push notification support.
Mule ESB is an integration platform, which means you create integration applications by using Mule configuration language and extending Mule programming components using the java platform. You deploy your integration application to a standalone Mule server or to CloudHub (Mulesoft's cloud environment). They also offer a pretty big library of connectors, which simplify integration with various other technologies and SaaS.
I have little experience with NServiceBus, but the documentation shows some of the same features as Mule ESB.
Since you can download both NServiceBus and MuleESB for free to try them, I'd suggest giving them both a whirl to see how they apply to your particular integration problem.
.NET service bus is designed to communicate with Azure and enable devices to do RCP-style calls. It does support pub/sub but the maximum message size is only 64 KB.
NServiceBus is probably the most capable choice in terms of interop. It supports one-way, full-duplex and pub/sub messaging. The maximum message size is 4 MB when using MSMQ for transport, but its data bus can be used to transfer large files. It also has a unique concept of sagas, which are long running processes with a shared state. I have not used the latest tools for it, but traditionally the tooling and integration options were not up to par compared to Java based solutions. Also, the licensing model is complex, and seems to be a subject to change with every release.
There is a Mass Transit free .NET service bus which has most of the NServiceBus features, but is a bit more difficult to use.
[edit] Mule ESB has a free community edition and a commercial version. It is a very mature Java based service bus. It has a lot of tooling and integration options with various products. But I do not think it has sagas. But it does have file transport support.

What message bus technologies exist in the *nix ecosystem?

My only experience with SOA comes from working with NServiceBus. It's really well designed and has some nifty features that I really like:
Processing of messages is transactional (and taken care of for you), so it's "once and only once" (as opposed to "at least once")
Built-in saga support
Automatic retry support
Pub/sub support (but I assume all service/message busses support this)
All that stuff leaves me to concentrate exclusively on the app's logic, but I've only used it in .NET, and Windows is almost certainly a non-starter for the project I'm working on. So my question is...
What service bus technologies out there exist in the *nix ecosystem (including experiences running NSB on Mono) and how do they measure up to NServiceBus running on Windows?
Bonus: In addition to the features above, what languages can send/receive/process messages from the bus? Having the flexibility to write one service in language A and another in language B would be very advantageous for this project.
SonicESB / MQ
I can speak from experience with SonicESB on Linux. It's basically SonicMQ - a JMS compliant MOM - with a process mediation layer on top; that's the service bus.
Pros
Itinerary-based routing; messages contain their own workflow for what services to visit
Intra-container messaging; increases performance by routing messages within the ESB container, avoiding the broker entirely.
Web service endpoints; ESB service may be invoked over HTTP endpoints, bridging the gap between non-Java/JMS clients and the bus.
Good development tools in eclipse for developing and debugging esb services and processes in Java.
Administration tools aren't bad either.
Cons
Transactions don't span service boundaries (may have changed since version 7.5)
No message retry mechanism; we rolled our own using a utility service and message parameter manipulation (may have changed in 7.5)
Pricey; licensed by core, so expect to pay for it.
Client Support
In terms of what technologies can send and receive to/from SonicESB, anything Java JMS, that's for sure. Sonic also offers a library in .net/C#/VB for Windows technology, so you can send and receive messages from the bus. This was a huge plus for us since our development teams use RIA's built in C#.
You may want to check out MuleESB, an open source service bus.
Hope it helps,
It has been quite a while since I've seriously used NServiceBus (in fact, back then, it wasn't even called that - it was just replacement library Udi wrote, to an awful comm library we had to use on a joint project :) ) so I don't know about all NServiceBus features.
I would say, based on what I do know, that Apache Kafka (originally developed by LinkedIn) would be a good starting point. It has relatively strong ordering guarantees, supports publish/subscribe to pools of consumers and is supportive of workflow behaviours e.g. Samza which provides a streaming framework on top of it
Also regarding the client interfaces. You can find the current list here

Why would I use Apache ServiceMix over just ActiveMQ

I am starting to plan a new platform which needs to integrate various services from various externals platforms. Essentially I'm tying together a bunch of internal, homegrown services and several outside services we license from 3rd parties.
Generally speaking the external services are all web services but they are a mishmash of REST, SOAP and XML-RPC.
Some of our internal services have REST API's but there are many things that aren't so easy: XMPP, Hessian, custom socket protocols, Java RPC, uWSGI, and the list goes on.
From my research it seems like an ESB like Apache ServiceMix might be a good fit for my needs. However it looks REALLY complex. I'm not launching rockets but I do need transactional messaging (mostly for eCommerce and entitlement stuff). I feel like the message queue ServiceMix uses under the hood (ActiveMQ) might be enough on its own.
Can anyone explain what ServiceMix provides above and beyond ActiveMQ? I know there is a lot but it is hard for an ESB n00b like me to really grasp the tangible difference when I'm waste-deep in buzzwords.
Thanks!
ServiceMix is an OSGi based container that allows you to deploy and run applications in a controlled runtime environment (like a J2EE container but less heavy weight and without programming to e.g. J2EE contracts).
Thanks to OSGi you can partition your applications into parts and update/evolve these parts independently from each other. You can upgrade parts of your application without having to take down the entire application. There is far better life cycle management in OSGi then you get with standalone Java processes.
If you think of creating an application that will evolve over time, then OSGi is something you should consider. And ServiceMix provides you a runtime OSGi container to deploy your applications to. I highly recommend the book "OSGi in Action" from Manning.
For tying together different external services that might even use different transport protocols I recommend Apache Camel, which btw also deploys nicely into ServiceMix.
Btw, existing applications can be deployed into an OSGi container with fairly little effort (without requiring code changes).
Torsten Mielke
FuseSource
Web: www.fusesource.com
Blog: http://tmielke.blogspot.com

wcf and multicore

I have a wcf service that will be running on a multicore system, with multiple NIC cards. Do I need to do anything in order to take full advantage of the cores? Do I need to run multiple instances of the service? Or will .NET automagically handle everything for me?
Thanks!!
There is an article discussing performance settings in WCF you may consider wrt. concurrency.