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Automation: Aspirin for WebSphere Migration Headaches

Written by Raman Sud

Monday, 13 December 2004 16:00

With each new version of IBM’s WebSphere application server, come compelling reasons for companies to upgrade. Often it is giant leaps in flexibility, functionality or scalability that make it worthwhile. Other times, as in the case of 4.x to 5.0, the end of support for the earlier platform made it essential. Regardless of why companies upgrade however, the process has its challenges.

None of these challenges is more daunting than porting application configurations from one version of WebSphere to a new distributed version and architecture. In the case of 5.0 for example, the new distributed architecture meant that the configuration model in 5.0 was completely different from its predecessor. This left IT departments with the difficult challenge of having to create and manage brand new configurations for hundreds of existing applications. Now, with the introduction of WebSphere 6.0 slated for early 2005, many users are preparing to face the same daunting challenges next year. Unfortunately, IBM does not provide any tools for automating this process. As a result, IT departments have been forced to do the migrations manually, one application at a time.

This manual configuration process is the main reason why it typically takes up to a day to set up a new environment for a single application server instance. For a large company that may need to implement hundreds or even thousands of WebSphere instances, this process represents an enormous productivity drag. Additionally, because each configuration requires keen attention to detail across a multi-step process, it is highly error prone, which leads to deployment delays and application downtime due to configuration errors.

Part of the problem is that the WebSphere administrative console is built to support a “one at a time” manual process, not a “one to many” automated one, in which entire nodes, cells or hives can be configured and managed collectively. And, there is no re-usability of configurations. With every application deployment, IT personnel must “reinvent the wheel” and start from scratch with configurations.

Many companies today are overcoming this problem by adopting new automated infrastructure configuration management solutions. These products have become available to the market in the last 12 months, and they provide a multidimensional configuration management database so IT departments can create a “library” of configurations that can be examined and re-used in an automated fashion when appropriate. This re-usability can reduce the time of deployment for a new application server from half a day to less than half an hour, thus radically improving the overall productivity of the IT department. It also eliminates manual configuration errors, thus enabling “service-oriented IT,” in which applications can be flawlessly configured, deployed and modified on a moment’s notice to keep pace with constantly changing business requirements.

In addition to the efficiency gains these solutions create when first deployed, one of their greatest benefits is the business agility and efficiency they create for the future. By establishing a process that centralizes the morass of configuration files and by building templates that enforce site specific standards, a change management process is established, and many of the tasks automated. Importantly, this also creates an abstraction layer that greatly simplifies future upgrades to upcoming releases of WebShpere.

The following sections go into greater detail as to how this type of solution can not only ease the migration to a new version of WebSphere, but also provide an ongoing, consolidated solution for managing configurations across the entire application lifecycle. For the purposes of illustration, we will use a real-life example of a WebSphere migration at a large publisher, who uses an automated configuration management solution from mValent (www.mvalent.com).

2004: A Migration Odyssey

Earlier this year, the IT department in one of the world’s foremost publishers of business information was faced with two substantial challenges. First, the department needed to move all of its production configuration data from a relational database to XML. Second, the company needed to migrate from WebSphere 4.x to WebSphere 5.0, which meant creating and managing all new application configurations for the 1,500 application servers deployed across the company’s test, certification, production and disaster recovery environments.

Both of these challenges required a similar technical solution: a consolidated way to create, manage and deploy application infrastructure configurations in an automated fashion, in order to save tremendous hours of manual work. With no commercial solutions geared specifically to managing these configurations across a large-scale, distributed environment, the department had developed homegrown tools and scripts for managing WebSphere 4.x configurations. However, because WebSphere 5.0 had a completely different management interface and configuration management model, those tools and scripts were obsolete.

Since creating new tools for managing WebSphere 5.0 simply was not practical, it became clear that the only way to meet these technology challenges was to use an age-old solution: brute force. The company’s IT department would simply have to undertake an incredibly time-consuming and laborious process of manually creating and managing configurations for all 1,500 application deployments on the WebSphere platform.

But just when it appeared that thousands of valuable IT man-hours would be consumed by manual labor, one of the company’s IT executives was introduced to a new kind of configuration management solution that could automate the creation, management and maintenance of IT infrastructure configurations. This solution enables enterprises to automatically build, manage and maintain complex infrastructure configurations throughout the entire application lifecycle, across distributed and off-shore locations. By adopting this solution, the IT department would be able to eliminate the manual processes involved with configuration creation and management, and instead, automate them through a single, scalable enterprise solution.

Curing Configuration Chaos

Using manual techniques, the company estimated that for every WebSphere-based application migration from 4.x to 5.0, someone on the IT staff would have to create and manage more than 20 identical configurations across the company’s test, certification, production and disaster recovery environments. To put this in perspective, let’s examine the cost savings of employing an automated configuration management solution vs. using manual techniques:

The table above illustrates the incredible amount of waste involved with manual configuration…and it does not even touch upon the thousands of opportunities for human errors every time a configuration is manually implemented on the WebSphere 5.0 platform. By automating the management of these configurations, the labor savings alone justified the investment in the infrastructure configuration management solution. When factoring in the additional benefits of eliminating the inevitable human errors that arise with manual configuration management, the investment in the solution became a “no brainer.”

With the infrastructure configuration management solution in place, the IT department can accomplish both of its main challenges — moving its relational configuration data to XML, and upgrading to the WebSphere 5.0 platform — in a fraction of the time that would be required using manual processes, while also eliminating configuration errors. In the case of mValent’s solution, this is accomplished through features including:

A centralized repository that captures, models and tracks infrastructure configuration meta-data, and the interdependencies between components;
A rich client interface that provides IT infrastructure teams with actionable tools to visualize, design, change, and build dynamic application environments;
A process automation framework that enables IT infrastructure teams to work collaboratively in automating their current manual tasks and processes for configuration and change management;
A peer-to-peer platform for synchronizing distributed and off-shore development, QA, staging, and production environments; and
A non-invasive, agent-less approach with minimal infrastructure requirements.

The company estimated that it would have required roughly two years of work to build a tool that could automate configuration management for the WebSphere 5.0 platform. By moving to a commercial solution, it was able to adopt the solution within a matter of weeks and slash migration time by up to 75 percent per application.

Ongoing Benefits

The benefits of the new solution were felt immediately in the form of radically reduced migration time and the elimination of manual-configuration-based errors. The solution also enabled “one to many” configuration management, so configurations can now be updated and managed across all application elements from a single console.

This has enabled the IT department to keep all of its configurations consistent across systems. This had always been the department’s goal, but when using manual, one-at-a-time configuration processes it was impossible to accomplish, and in reality no two supposedly identical application servers were ever configured exactly alike.

Likewise, the solution automates the management of dependent configurations, such as those of Web servers and database servers. This enables the IT department to implement these configuration changes automatically, every time they need to make a configuration change on the WebSphere platform. This has historically been one of the most common areas of configuration errors, not only because it requires configuration changes across a number of different application elements; but also because those elements are usually managed by different people within the IT organization.

Diagnosis and repair of configuration problems has also been simplified. In the past, whenever there was a configuration-related problem with an application, the IT department had to manually compare the bad configuration parameters with a known good configuration to find the problem. It could take hours to find the bad configuration using this technique. This was more than just a productivity problem, however. It actually jeopardized the company’s ability to generate revenue, since millions of end-users rely on its applications for vital information and purchase millions of dollars of archived content every day. Every minute of application downtime represented lost revenue.

With its new automated infrastructure configuration management solution, the IT department can identify and repair configuration inconsistencies automatically, within a matter of seconds, ensuring that the company never has revenue interruptions due to application outages.

The new solution has also simplified the migration of configuration data from relational to XML. All of this data can be stored and managed in the central repository, and pushed out to application components as needed.

Before adopting the new solution, any change in an application required people to go into multiple systems to input manual changes. This led to frequent errors and inconsistencies often resulting in application malfunctions, which required further manual labor to identify the configuration problem. With the configuration data stored as XML in a single repository, the department simply has to change a configuration once, test it against the repository for conflicts, and then push it out to all appropriate infrastructure components. This eliminates configuration-related application downtime and saves an enormous amount of time as well.

Migration, not Migraines

By eliminating the manual-configuration productivity drain, the IT department easily completed its WebSphere migration. The benefits of the solution don’t end once the migration is complete, however. Any time a configuration needs to be touched — whether it’s for deployment, retirement or simple modification — the threat of configuration chaos looms. Now that the organization has centralized its configuration files, and created templates with variables that allow for consistency across different types application configurations, a layer of abstraction exists between the release specific WebSphere Application Server and the configurations themselves. The direct result is that any future migration efforts, like the imminent challenge of moving to WebSphere 6.0, will benefit from the centralization, control and templates that are already in place. Future migrations therefore, will be easily automated, ensuring that the benefits of the solution are repeated with each new migration challenge.

Additionally, the new solution has radically simplified the company’s off-shore development operations. In the past, its offshore development operations would use its own set of configurations for developing and testing applications, and then the IT department would have to reconcile those configurations with its own infrastructure – again, by hand – before the applications could be deployed.

The automated infrastructure configuration management solution enables all developers — both in house and off-shore — to work off the same, centralized repository of configurations. This enables the company to clone entire application environments to ensure total consistency across all stages of the application lifecycle, and across geographic and organizational boundaries. By building sets of configuration files that specify the complete settings of all elements of the application infrastructure, and then storing these configuration sets centrally, the solution made it possible for the IT department to ensure that the development, testing, staging, and production environments were synchronized across the U.S. and abroad.

By providing a single, consistent way to manage configurations across the entire application lifecyle — through development, testing, certification and deployment — the department estimates that its automated infrastructure configuration management solution has slashed application migration time by nearly 60 percent. Thus the new solution paid for itself in a matter of weeks. More importantly, it has substantially improved the return on investment in the WebSphere platform, because workers can deploy more applications in a shorter amount of time. They can reduce the amount of time and effort required to manage those applications. Outsourced development operations are much more tightly integrated with internal operations. And, most importantly, configuration-related downtime has virtually disappeared.

Raman Sud is Vice President of Engineering for mValent, developer of the mValent Infrastructure Automation Suite. Sud has 20 years of experience delivering mission critical software for enterprises and telecommunication service providers leveraging distributed development and building integrated teams in the US and India, with companies including PurchasingCenter.com/Excara, Open Market, Inc., IBM/ROLM Corporation, Centigram Communication Corporation and Octel Communications.

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