Bigmon Cloud Monitoring Saved My Site

Posted on Jun 18, 2011 in Business Strategy, News and Updates, Offerings, Technical Tips | 0 comments

Over the years, the M&S Consulting site has grown quite a bit. We have hundreds of blog articles and have retired more pages of content than are currently active. By introducing Bigmon Cloud into our environment, we realized — to our surprise — that our site was one of the slower loading sites when compared to other sites we have built, either for internal project or customers.

By using Bigmon metrics reporting and trending, we were able to test mechanisms for speeding up the site and moving performance into a place we felt was acceptable. Then, we were able to set new thresholds in Bigmon to ensure that we are notified when/if the site begins to perform in a manner that is less than optimal. Following are some of the Bigmon charts you will see that drive home the success of our updates as well as the value of Bigmon Cloud. You will see that we were able to address the performance issues immediately and the results are trending in slices of 2 hours, 1 day, and 1 week. Results have been consistent.

Virtual Machines for Development – VMWare Player, VMWare ESXi, VMWare Workstation, Oracle Virtualbox

Posted on Apr 8, 2011 in Industry Trends, Technical Tips | 0 comments

I had been using VMWare Server 2 for a few years now. It was free and provided extra features that were not present in VMWare Player. Unfortunately I found out that VMWare Server is no longer going to be supported as of June 2011. I needed to make a decision quickly so I could stand up a Linux CentOS VM to run a memory intensive software stack.

For me VMWare Server probably would not have worked anyway because of memory and processor restrictions. I decided to look to 3 different solutions to get me up and running quickly, VMWare Player, VMWare Workstation and Oracle VirtualBox (formerly Sun VirtualBox).

VMWare Player

VMWare Player was included early on because it now allows you to create VMs instead of only running them. It also has increased memory and processors/cores available to a VM. I did however quickly eliminate Player because it lacks essential features including multiple snapshots, cloning and replay.

Snapshots are a must have as I am always installing different operating systems, software and making configuration changes. Some of the changes involve technology I have not worked with before so being able to rollback to a snapshot if something goes wrong has been an invaluable tool. This also allows me to experiment more knowing I can recover to a previous state.

VMWare ESXi

VMWare suggests moving to one of their other products, mainly ESXi or Workstation. ESXi is free and looks to be an exciting product. It basically is your base operating system. It requires a dedicated server with no base OS installed. It also limits the types of hardware it works with, so no you can’t break out your old PC and have it automagicly work with ESXi. I did not have a dedicated box so I chose to look at VMWare Workstation.

VMWare Workstation

VMWare Workstation had all of the functionality I was looking for including snapshots, cloning and replay. It also had good memory (32g), processor (8) and core (8 per processor) support. I downloaded and installed Version 7. I created a Linux CentOS VM. The install was overly easy with “Easy Install” and the OS booted up in no time. The user interface for workstation is intuitive and provides easy configuration. I installed VMWare tools and changed my display resolution. Next up, I started my software stack taking snapshots along the way. The branching snapshot functionality was easy and worked well. All in all Workstation was quick and easy.

VirtualBox

Next I looked at VirtualBox 4. VirtualBox was started under Sun as an open source product. It is obviously now an Oracle product and still open source. VirtualBox has come a long way and provides many features that are present in VMWare Workstation. Installation of CentOS was only a bit more of a task then VMWare Easy Install. VirtualBox’s UI was fairly simple and I liked the layout with the popout VM windows. The initial install did not have have a CD/DVD ROM drive installed so installing VirtualBox Guest Additions (like VMWare Tools) did not work. Not a big deal, just add a CD drive.

The VirtualBox VM OS window played funny tricks with my mouse as I tried to move it in and out of the window. I am also not quite clear on how you increase the size of the virtual hard drive after creation. Say you need more hard drive space on a certain drive or partition how do you do that in VirtualBox? I see you can add another virtual hard drive but no way to increase the existing drives size. I have increased the drive size for a VMWare Workstation Linux VM drive and then used a repartition tool to allocate the extra space.

My final decision was to go with VMWare Workstation. This was a result of Workstation’s features, support and maturity of the product. I also chose it because it has a broad base of use, it’s ease of sharing VMs. It has ACE, better snapshot functionality, replay, integration with Eclipse, encryption and 3D video. Workstation 7.1 does retail for $189 right now, although I did receive a discount on it. I have started to Google “coupon” for everything I buy now to see if there are any discounts out there on the web. I did this for Workstation and received 30% off. I did really like Virtual Box’s speed and ease of use. I will be spending more time with this free product soon.

I have gone back and forth with free and commercial software, they both have their place in my opinion. I have used Eclipse for years and love it. However, I believe that nothing is really ever free. You have to sacrifice some functionality, support and reliability for products that are free. Even with Eclipse, I ended up moving to the new-at-the-time MyEclipse commercial product because I liked some of the extra functionality and tooling it provided. This was a commercial product with a free product as its base! Everything has its place and obviously if you don’t have the cash then free is the way to go. It gives an entire population of our community access to tools. I don’t know where I would be with out these free products.

This is just a quick look at a few of the Virtual Machine technologies out there today. In the future I am interested in looking at Oracle VM and Linux Xen. What are your opinions of Virtual Machines?

Four Middleware 11g Servers — Here we go!

Posted on Feb 8, 2011 in News and Updates, Offerings | 0 comments

We just started into installs for four middleware servers for a customer. These will each run DB, WebLogic, IdM, SOA/BPM, UCM, and WebCenter — all 11g.

There’s nothing like getting fresh, fast, functionally-useless hardware and turning it into a powerful piece of problem-solving equipment. – Historic M&S Dogma

Oracle Identity Management IdM/OID 11g Patch Set 3 (PS3) 11.1.1.4 Download for Windows, Linux, etc.

Posted on Jan 25, 2011 in News and Updates, Technical Tips | 1 comment

Unlike WebCenter, SOA/BPM, WebLogic Server, and other products in the recent Middleware 11g PS3 release from Oracle, Identity Management 11g PS3 (11.1.1.4) is not yet available as a full download on oracle.com yet. What you need to do until they get the uploads posted is download 11.1.1.2 from the Identity Management 11g download page and then download 11.1.1.4 from My Oracle Support (aka Metalink) by finding patch set 11060980. I know it took me a little to find this, so hopefully this helps someone until the release is available on the public-facing website.

Liferay IDE Installation and Development on Windows

Posted on Dec 26, 2010 in News and Updates, Technical Tips | 2 comments

My experience is that Liferay 6.x is excellent. It is even better with the addition of Liferay IDE.

This guide walks through the following topics related to setting up your local Windows environment for Liferay development using Liferay IDE:

• Installing Liferay IDE
• Liferay Plugins SDK Installation and Configuration in Liferay IDE
• Liferay Portal Configuration in Liferay IDE
• Developing and Deploying HelloWorld Portlet in Liferay IDE

Software and versions used for the screenshots in this tutorial are:

• Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
• Eclipse Helios 3.6.x
• Liferay IDE 1.1.x
• Liferay Portal 6.0.5
• Tomcat 6.0.26
• Liferay Plugins SDK 6.0.2

Update Eclipse IDE Steps (Helios 3.6) – With Screenshots

Posted on Dec 24, 2010 in Technical Tips | 0 comments

I just updated my local copy of Eclipse and thought I would share a quick series of screenshots. Enjoy.

Enterprise, Dynamic Web Form Generation – Formulator

Posted on Dec 23, 2010 in Offerings, Technical Tips | 0 comments

We are working on an interesting project dynamically generating web forms for the enterprise. We have done this many times in the past, but this time, we are taking dynamic form generation to a new level.

The scale, architecture, flexibility, and robust functionality that we are building is exciting. In its simplest form, we are allowing an enterprise entity to be mapped to web forms dynamically, along with both an administrative and end-user interfaces to manage the process. Here is a draft we are customizing for a customer (the actual implementation looks even more interesting/fresh).

I have talked to some people recently that have expressed similar needs. Contact us if you are interested.

BPM 11g Integrated with WebCenter Spaces (Process Spaces)

Posted on Sep 27, 2010 in News and Updates, Offerings, Technical Tips | 0 comments

Our Fusion Middleware expertise allows us to bring it all together. Do you want to follow business processes and ensure transparency to your organization?

M&S Consulting has implemented a next generation process portal built on Oracle BPM/SOA, Identity Management, WebCenter, and innovating solutions built by M&S from the ground up. Underlying technologies include WebLogic and ADF.