1. Compelling Events for Automation
• Middleware Upgrades It’s great when new vendors
bring out new features - but often taking advantage of
them takes a good deal of time and effort to upgrade
the new infrastructure - and introduces risk. Automating
the upgrade project speeds it up, reduces the risk and
builds a more manageable platform in the future.
• Migrating off ‘Premium Product’ With the economy
as it is, more organizations are forced to tighten their
belts, and one area that has come under particular
scrutiny is the annual cost of maintaining installed
software. Some organizations have made the decision
to move less business critical applications off more
expensive middleware onto open-source platforms
such as JBoss and Tomcat. This type of project is
accelerated when it’s automated and an automation
tool makes managing hybrid or heterogeneous
environments much easier.
• Building a PAAS or a private cloud With pressure
on businesses to deliver more innovation to their
customers, faster, we see many of our customers
building Platforms As A Service and private clouds.
These are a lot faster and quicker to set up using an
automation tool, and a lot quicker to manage demand
once they are up and running.
• Core business application upgrades or migrations
Many of our customers occasionally need to upgrade
or even replace their core business applications - often
complex, multi-layered, integrated systems that have
evolved over time and have many integration points
and are absolutely critical to the minute by minute
operations of the business. Using an automation tool
can reduce the risk and time associated with such
a project.
• Platform migrations Sometimes it’s time to move
from one platform to another - for instance, customers
sometimes feel that a UNIX based platform will
offer them performance advantages over an OS400
platform. But moving hundreds of middleware
applications might seem like a challenge too far -
without automation.
WebLogic Insights
• WebLogic Application Server is a complex, highly
configurable product with literally thousands of
interrelated configuration items. The WebLogic
plugins support deployment of code (in the
form of ear/war files) and configuration to the
WebLogic domain.
• The plugin includes tasks to install and patch
WebLogic binaries on the target server.
• The plugin includes modules for snapshotting
all configuration items in a WebLogic domain
for comparison over time to highlight
configuration drift. The exported configuration
may also be templated and used as the basis to
re-import to this, or another, WebLogic domain.
Snapshotting may be achieved by either file
based or JMX methodologies.
• The plugin also includes modules for WebLogic
configuration and code deployment via a Python
scripting framework. This allows for an application,
its mappings and WebLogic configuration items
to be deployed in an idempotent way (The
deployment always brings the target up to the
desired state). All common configuration items are
supported in a simple to understand and use way.
• It is easy, for example, to set a cluster count and
topology with a couple of configuration lines, instead
of the (potentially) thousands of lines that would
be needed using an xml export definition. Then, to
create a package to increase the cluster count by
one cluster member on each node in the topology is
a single character change to the configuration file.
This will be rolled out and updated automatically on
the next deployment to this environment, along with
any other code and configuration changes bundled
into this package. Packages can be rolled forwards
and back as required.
MidVision Extension to the IBM Rational
Automation Framework: WebLogic
MidVision Extensions extend the target platforms of the IBM Rational Automation
Framework which provides organisations with Application Release Automation capabilities
to reduce costs, improve productivity and time to value and assure compliance. This
datasheet refers to the MidVision Extension for WebSphere Message Broker.
MidVisionExtensiontoIBMRAF
