Editor's Letter

Are You Ready for Impact?

Dear WebSpherian,

Impact 2011 is right around the corner.  The staff of the Sphere Journal Online and The Global WebSphere Community is looking forward to meeting you.  

If you attended Impact last year, you know that the GWC was the "fun group" — we handed out lots of cool buttons, hats, and t-shirts all over the conference and made hundreds of new friends in the process.

Here are some of the highlights of what’s in store this year:

Get your witty WebSpherian buttons at the GWC table outside Impact registration, at the entrance to the Solution Center, and the Global WebSphere Community Corner (3101 A&B) at the Venetian.  

In the Global WebSphere Community Corner (3101 A&B), you'll have opportunities to network and meet up with other members of the community and your local WUG.  You’ll also want to attend one of the special GWC Focus Groups we will be hosting as a means to learn more about us and us to learn more about what you desire from the Global WebSphere Community.

Here are some additional exciting Impact 2011 GWC activities you’ll be hearing more about:   

• Play the GWC’s  “Spin It to Win It” for an opportunity to be the daily winner

• Participate in the GWC Daily Blog — every time you blog at WebSphereUserGroup.org you have a chance to win the GWC Daily Blog Contest

• Tired of the same old profile picture?  Have some fun and take a new profile picture in the GWC’s FaceBooth

• Attend local WUG meetups

• Participate in GWC member training, leader training, and self-guided tours

Can't make the keynote?  Don't worry, WebSphereUserGroup.org will live stream it to you — wherever you are.

Enjoy this issue and we look forward to seeing you in person at Impact 2011!

Best regards,

Bruce Lynch, Editor and Publisher
The Sphere Journal Online

The Leading Edge of WebSphere

Take Steps Now to Avoid Virtual Image Sprawl

By Dustin Amrhein, Technical Evangelist, WebSphere Emerging Technologies

Virtual images are all the rage these days. Nearly every company I work with today is making use of them for some or nearly all of their projects. In WebSphere development, we make extensive use of them to support developers and testers on a daily basis. In fact, I would be willing to bet that most of you reading this column make use of virtual images in your job now -- whether you know it or not.

The widespread use of virtual images is not the least bit surprising if you look at the benefits they provide. When you use a virtual image, you can usually instantiate your working environment exponentially faster as compared to traditional provisioning means. Further, the preservation of the necessary software components directly in the virtual image eliminates the need to carry out time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone installation tasks each time you need a particular environment. You simply activate the virtual image and in a few minutes, you get the working environment you need.

Of course, it is not all peaches and cream when it comes to virtual images. Couple the lure of the benefits with the fact that it is relatively easy for users to create their own virtual images, and you have a perfect recipe for an explosion in virtual image inventory. Every user in a company starts to build custom virtual images and the company must then cope with the proliferation or sprawl. Left unchecked, this virtual image sprawl can drastically increase management overhead, thereby eliminating any benefits the images would have otherwise provided.

So, does this mean that I am telling you to cease and desist with your virtual image usage? Not a chance! However, I do think that you need to do be on the lookout for ways to prevent virtual image sprawl. While there are potentially many things you could do in this regard, I do want to propose something specific. Put simply, it is time to create a smarter way to build virtual images.

As I said, it is not especially difficult to create a virtual image. On the other hand, it is more difficult to construct a virtual image that is both easily consumable and adaptable to a number of different usage scenarios. The tendency of many virtual image authors is to capture as much content as possible, from raw binaries to user-specific configuration, directly in the virtual image.

While this does produce a virtual image that is easy to use, it also produces an image with a very narrow scope of applicability. If everyone within an organization takes this approach to creating images, there is little doubt that there will be a spike in inventory as shown in the graph above. This spike in inventory is the worst possible outcome. Clearly, the desirable outcome is to build virtual images that are easy to use but also apply to a number of different usage scenarios, thereby reducing the total number of required images.

To do this, you must first identify software components that you should directly install in the virtual image. These components may not always be easy to identify, but as a rule, you can use the following characteristics to make your determination:

• Size of components: You should directly install into the image components with large binaries. 

• Duration of installation: You should directly install into the image components that require a significant amount of installation time.  

• Degree of applicability: You should directly install into the image those components required across most or all of your environments. This may include security software, monitoring agents, or any other widely used software.

Even with the above guidelines, it is not always easy to make a decision on what goes directly into the image and what does not. I always caution users to think and then re-think the direct installation of any component that will significantly reduce the chances of reuse.

Careful consideration of what to install into an image is only the first step. Although I am encouraging you to strive to build virtual images with a wide-range of applicability, the fact is that you will deploy the virtual image to suit a very specific use case. The virtual image must contain the necessary configuration in order to support your needs, but that does not mean you have to statically capture that configuration directly into the image. A better way would be to provide scripts, let’s call them activation scripts, that run every time you deploy a given image. The job of these scripts is to take in your input about the kind of environment you want and use that input to configure the virtual environment as is necessary. This allows you to reuse a single virtual image across a number of different contexts. The virtual images remain easy to use as they provide both installation and configuration tasks, but they do not sacrifice flexibility in order to provide these benefits.

On the surface, this is not a radical or new idea. In fact, IBM ships images built in this way today. Our IBM Hypervisor Edition virtual images, such as the WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition, provide both consumability and flexibility. The challenge for many users is the lack of tools that support the construction of these kinds of images. In that light, I am happy to announce a new IBM alphaWorks technology called the IBM Image Construction and Composition Tool. The tool provides a framework that allows you to build virtual images according to the methodology discussed above. Additionally, it automates many of the packaging and metadata generation tasks necessary to deploy these images using WebSphere CloudBurst, Tivoli Provisioning Manager, or the IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud.

If you are a virtual image user, I strongly encourage you to take steps now to address or prevent virtual image sprawl. I hope the information above sheds a little light on how you can do that. Best of luck!

Your WebSphere Deep Diving Instructor

By Andy Piper, WebSphere Messaging Community Lead, IBM

I closed out my column last month by hinting at things that may lie ahead in 2011, particularly for the messaging and connectivity areas of the WebSphere family. Let’s look a little more broadly at what is happening in the platform.

WebSphere’s CTO and IBM Fellow Jerry Cuomo recently posted his “Top 7 WebSphere trends for 2011”. Jerry has  been posting these for a few years now, and this time around he’s done so in the form of a song (he’s also in a band) - check it out on YouTube! (http://bit.ly/wstrends2011). The trends posting often forms a pointer to what Jerry and the senior technical leaders in WebSphere will go into in more detail at the annual Impact conference, too. Keep an eye on it.

So what’s in there? I’m not going to tackle every one of Jerry’s trends in detail this month, but I’m sure we’ll continue to return to them over the course of the year. Here’s a sampling, combined with some of my own thoughts.

First of all, cloud remains big: particularly looking at the idea of hybrid clouds (enabled by the DataPower Cast Iron appliance) and Platform as a Service. In my consulting work I regularly had to help to tune operating systems and recommend or support hardware platforms — these skills remain important but virtualisation and hypervisors are helping to insulate the platform runtime from the metal to a degree that was not always so true. I’m hearing Microsoft customers talk more and more about Hyper-V, Linux folks talk about Xen, and so on.  Many of the WebSphere capabilities are now available in Hypervisor editions which can be deployed into containters and scaled out quickly from a Cloudburst Appliance, and after that it is a case of managing the private cloud and connecting it to partners and third parties, which is where Cast Iron can be very effective.

Edge optimisation, acceleration, and mobile are also really significant areas that are called out in the 2011 trends piece. I’m pleased to see the increased focus in these areas. I’m carrying several mobile devices now, and connecting with data in all kinds of new ways. I mentioned the MQ Telemetry technology last month, and in my opinion that is important here too — HTTP as a protocol and REST as a principle are fine, but they are actually not optimised for more limited networks, are very “chatty” on the wire, and they are fundamentally brittle and unreliable. If we want to continuously harvest data from the edge of the network and from mobile devices, it is handy to have a smaller, more compact protocol that supports multiple qualities of service in that space, too.

My own experience of the WebSphere platform is that the foundations are solid — and when we get to hear about the trends that lie ahead, it’s a great time to start investigating, extending our understanding,  and learning something new.

The Message Queue

News and Notes on What’s Happening Today with WebSphere and Business

IBM, Wholesale Applications Community Partnering with Telecoms to Make Building App Stores Simple and Fast
The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), a body which includes board members from the likes of Orange and Vodafone, has produced a cloud-based "white label" mobile app store.

Built on IBM’s WebSphere Commerce customer interaction platform, the store front provides mobile operators with a virtual space they can populate with apps.

The IBM software allows store owners to set up automatic discount offers based on customer preferences and buying behavior, whilst also enabling targeted advertising campaigns for a more tailored experience for the end user.

WAC has a catalogue of over 12,000 applications, all of which are automatically included in the white label store.

For mobile operators looking to expand and grow their business, the cloud-based, white label application storefront developed by IBM delivers the functionality to quickly and effectively launch their own WAC-enabled storefront.

To learn more, go to:
http://www.itpro.co.uk/631072/mwc-2011-ibm-aims-to-ease-app-store-creation

IBM Addressing Server Workload Demands
IBM’s range of workload-optimized systems have been developed for enterprises with over-burdened data centers looking for a way to increase efficiency, performance and optimization while still gaining insights from the information.

Additions to the zEnterprise System includes new support for the IBM WebSphere DataPower X150 integration appliance.

The XI50z is a workload-optimized appliance that lets data and applications communicate, regardless of the location of the servers on which the information is stored.

IBM said that customers will get an all-encompassing view of their server estate, even if it is scattered across the enterprise.

The firm also introduced the Storwize Rapid Application Storage kit, which IBM said is quick to implement and allows simplified ongoing administration and management.

IBM claimed that Storwize accelerates backup time, and reduces downtime by almost 90 per cent when compared against similar backups in SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Exchange.

IBM has also announced Blade networking and Ethernet systems that are expected to be adopted quickly by companies working in cloud computing, business analytics or high-performance computing.

Workload Optimised Blade for Database, for is a pre-configured eX5 Blade System for database applications which could help support the growing numbers of transaction-oriented workloads and new types of information, such as web video and photos

To learn more, go to:
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2274783/ibm-datacentres-workload

Nolio ASAP 3.1 available for IBM WebSphere
Now that Nolio ASAP 3.1 is available for IBM WebSphere, the Websphere community can now be part of one of 2011’s fastest growing IT movements, Devops, which analysts describe as a 'grassroots movement to deal with the complexity of servicing modern applications.'

The integrated management of Websphere versions 6 and the latest version 7 with Nolio’s highly regarded Application Service Automation Platform (ASAP) was driven by demand from Websphere customers. Websphere users can now replicate the agile techniques many deploy in development through to their datacenters and production environments, bringing faster application upgrades despite the increased complexity of modern business applications, many written in Java within necessarily complex Websphere environments.

Nolio 3.1, released earlier this year, was designed to minimize the possibility of human error during routine maintenance and upgrades as well as to provide a clear, fully documented audit trail of interventions and process workflows should this be required. These features typically result in a 30 percent uplift in productivity and a six times faster release cycle for release managers using Nolio.

As an early leader in Devops, Nolio is opening the IBM WebSphere world to its Devops offerings and bringing a fresh approach to IBM Websphere release management.

To learn more go to:
http://pr-usa.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=618640&Itemid=33

Demo: Use WebSphere Cloudburst Appliance to Manage the Private
Cloud Efficiently
Today’s dynamic business environments and economic uncertainty mean organizations must work smarter to remain competitive and respond to changing demands. However, the cost of managing and running today’s business applications, from enterprise wide to departmental level, is now far exceeding the cost of the software and hardware itself. At the same time, while the need to rapidly adapt to changing marketing conditions has never been greater, adapting is costly. In order to meet business needs while controlling cost, you need to be able to optimize the management of your business applications.

During this Demonstration, you will see how WebSphere Cloudburst Appliance can be used to efficiently manage the private cloud. By (1), Highlighting the benefits of codifying your IT environment for repeatable and easy re-deployments. (2) Introducing, Policy-level management techniques to efficiently use the resources involved. (3) Scale-out your Web Application performance by off-loading HTTP-Session management. (4) Enable customer access to Enterprise Web-Services via protocol transformation.

Access the demonstration:

• Summary (5 min): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tSxFfyB-qg 
• Play list for the extended version: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=CC3CF68E3F31207B&feature=bf-title
  

Capitalware Unveils New WebSphere MQ Auditing Tool
Organizations that are concerned with what's going on within their WebSphere MQ implementation may want to consider an affordable MQ auditing tool unveiled recently by Capitalware. MQ Auditor, supports IBM i and other platforms, and starts at $229 per queue.

MQ Auditor (MQA) enables an organization to track all MQ API calls performed by MQ applications that are connected to a queue manager, according to Capitalware, which specializes in creating WebSphere MQ utilities. The software converts into a human-readable format all the details of more than 30 different API calls in WebSphere MQ versions 5.3, 6.0, and 7.0.

Capitalware gives users the capability to filter the data collected with MQA version 1.1 in three ways, including by application name, by user ID, and by MQ queues. Data collected by MQA is placed into a separate file or queue, and is presented in the comma separated value (CSV) format.

To prevent MQA from creating an endlessly looping job, Capitalware advises customers not to point MQA's output file to an MQ queue that could be monitored, but to a separate file. (Pointing it to an MQ queue would create the dangerous situation where MQA continuously audits its own audit.)

Lacroix is a devout practitioner of the WebSphere MQ arts. "In 1994, I was introduced to MQSeries (now called WebSphere MQ) and I thought it was the next best thing since man discovered fire," Lacroix writes in his new blog.

MQA is available as an exit program for IBM i, as a DLL for Windows, and as a non-GUI shared library for Unix and Linux. Pricing starts at $229 per monitored queue for volume deals, or $299 without the volume rate. Enterprise licenses cost $55,000. The annual maintenance fee is 15 percent.

For more information go to:
http://www.itjungle.com/fhs/fhs012511-story05.html

JBoss Versus IBM WebSphere: Cost, Performance, Efficiency,
Innovation (IBM wins)
Comparisons of WebSphere Application Server (WAS) and JBoss AS frequently focus on an application development point of view alone – only looking at feature sets and initial acquisition costs. Too often free initial cost can lead developers to favor JBoss as many are unaware of IBM's own no charge edition of WebSphere Application Server for Developers. And unfortunately, some operation managers do not know about the choice of JBoss until it is too late. The following comparison reveals many more factors for organizations to consider in their selection process. Use the link below to download four whitepapers, a toolkit, and a video:

1. IBM WebSphere^® Application Server V7 vs. JBoss^® Application Server V5 TCO Analysis. This detailed 28 page report from independent consultancy Summa Technologies goes into deep detail comparing JBoss AS 5 and WAS V7 from a number of perspectives:
   • Licensing, maintenance, subscription costs 
   • Hardware (required to run similar apps) 
   • Training 
   • Productivity during software development 
   • Administration 
   • Installation and Configuration 
   • Backwards Compatibility 
   • Upgrade/Migration path 
   • Cluster Administration 
   • Security, Scripting, Serviceability

   Summa Technologies’ projections indicate that as the size and complexity of a deployment and the supporting organization grows (even moderately) in breadth, the bulk of costs shifts from product acquisition to administration and other operational activities. In addition to higher skill level requirements for JBoss AS administration there proved to be significant functional shortcomings for its use in a production enterprise application environment – both in its lack of important product capabilities and in its difficulty of administration.
   
   "JBoss AS 5 is lacking critical functionality in many areas including security, administration, backwards compatibility, and cluster reliability to name a few. When we examined factors such as system administration, software maintenance, ease of integration and development costs we found that the products take very different approaches that significantly impact TCO."

2. IBM written short 8 page brochure comparison of WebSphere Application Server vs. JBoss AS. This brochure describes how these 3 key attributes of IBM’s Smart SOA Application Foundation: Performance, Innovation, and Efficiency, help deliver higher quality of service at a lower cost than JBoss, making IBM the clear choice for you and your customers.

3. Understanding Transactional Integrity and how JBoss compares to WebSphere. The ability to maintain data in  a reliable and consistent state, regardless of any system or business failure that may occur, is ensuring transaction integrity. This paper covers:
   • What are Transactions?
   • Where Can Transaction Integrity Fail?
   • What is an In-doubt Data Transaction?
   • Can JBoss Ensure Transactional Integrity?
   • Proven Transactional Integrity with WebSphere Application Server

   IBM WebSphere Application Server is designed to ensure transactional integrity and data consistency through automatic recovery when transaction failures occur, even under heavy loads, demonstrating high resiliency. IBM is “enterprise ready”. By contrast, IBM believes the open source-based JBoss Application Server cannot automatically recover from distributed transaction failures. For customers looking at JBoss as an alternative to IBM, the potential loss of business from distributed transaction failures, in IBM’s opinion, makes JBoss a higher risk and cost solution. Would you base your business on questionable transaction processing?

4. JBoss to IBM WebSphere Application Server Migration Toolkit

   IBM WebSphere Application Server Migration Toolkit provides a way to assist you in migrating applications from JBoss to IBM WebSphere Application Server. Migrating Java EE applications from one application server to another can be costly and time consuming. The Application Migration Tool scans for server-specific data and provides a way to review and change that data so that applications can run on WebSphere Application Server.

5. Evaluating Whether Open Source Application Server Software is Right for Your Company

   This IBM^® Redguide™ publication provides a framework for evaluating whether open source application server software is appropriate for your company. It begins with an overview of the philosophy and methodology inherent in open source software development, and highlights the potential benefits and pitfalls of incorporating this model in your organization. The IBM WebSphere^® Application Server offerings, which range from an open source version to top of the line commercial solutions, are described and compared. Finally, some guidelines are provided to help you match your business requirements to the most appropriate and valuable technology.

6. 1 min Funny Video: “Skip” the developer Struggles to Stay Productive with the Boss

   This fun 1 minute video infomercial features “Skip” the developer complaining to “Stan” about how “the boss” is hurting productivity because of lack of management features, constant restarts, poor manual/tutorials, low compatibility, etc. Skip is so mad he’s ready to ctrl-alt-delete!

   To get all the assets listed above free, go to: http://www.infoq.com/vendorcontent/show.action?vcr=1316

In Focus

XSLT Stylesheet Development, Administration and Testing Web Service for WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliance using Eclipse IDE – All-in-One
by Purush Das, Domain Architect, Ascendant Technology

This article shows you how to use Eclipse Platform for following:

1. Administering IBM^® WebSphere^® DataPower SOA Appliance(hereafter called DataPower)
2. Ability to compile XSLT stylesheets on a remote DataPower device and then to use the compiled stylesheets to transform XML files on the DataPower device. The result of the transform can be placed back in the current Eclipse Project.
3. Using XML & WSDL Editor within Eclipse
4. Testing of Web Services using SoapUI within Eclipse.

All the steps above are accomplished without leaving the Eclipse Environment.

Click here to read more

Choosing the WebSphere Application Server ND topology that's right for your system — Achieving high stability for multiclient WebSphere applications
by Jamie Pope, senior technology manager and Ying Ding, president, Greater Charlotte WebSphere Users Group 

Many enterprise WebSphere systems use topologies that share Java Virtual Machine (JVM) clusters with both mission-critical core applications and client applications. Learn about three alternate topologies based on WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment (ND) that you can implement to prevent costly system instability and downtime.

Click here to read more

Business Partner in Focus: How to Predict Application Performance Problems

Sphere Journal Online readers can download Unraveling the Mystery: How to Predict Application Performance Problems, brought to you by Nastel Technologies, from the Global WebSphere Community Website.  Here’s an abstract:

Complexity.  It is a word that describes today’s composite applications, and it is increasing.  How does one manage these complex, composite applications that depend on many other systems, such as networks, servers, storage, security, firewalls, and even electricity – all of which are prone to failure?  How do we know that our application is in fact misbehaving and if so the impact of this on the business?  While today's tools are good at identifying faults, data centers receive thousands of fault alerts daily. Further complicating the situation is that many of these have nothing to do with system-wide outages, but are in fact part of the normal operations.  How can we make sense of all this data and uncover and resolve problems before users are impacted?

Read this whitepaper to learn how to:

• Uncover problems before users are impacted and resolve them before the pain is felt

• Combine complex event processing, transaction flow and analytics allows organizations to express multifaceted business conditions and apply them to a complex system

• Determine “normal” vs. “abnormal” application behavior

Click here to download this whitepaper now