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.

WebSphere Application Server Insights• WebSphere is a complex, highly configurable

product with literally thousands of interrelated configuration items. The RapidDeploy™ WebSphere plugin supports deployment of code (in the form of ear/war files) and configuration to the WebSphere cell.

• The plugin includes tasks to install and patch WebSphere binaries on target server and configure profiles, federate nodes, configure cell security configure soap.client.props and other files.

• The plugin includes modules for snapshotting all configuration items in a WebSphere cell for comparison over time to highlight configuration drift. The exported configuration may also be templated and used as the basis to reimport to this, or another, WebSphere cell.

• The plugin also includes modules for WebSphere configuration and code deployment via a Jython scripting framework. This allows for an application, its mappings and WebSphere 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.

RApIddEploy™ plugIn foR IBM WEBSphERE ApplICAtIon SERvER

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Rapiddeploy™ provides organizations with Application Release Automation capabilities to reduce costs, improve productivity and time to value and assure compliance. there is a range of plugins available to extend the core automation framework capabilities to most available platforms and perform integrations throughout the devops toolchain. this datasheet refers to the WebSphere Application Server plugin.

Plugins are downloaded through the Plugin Manager console in RapidDeploy™, or from the MidVision website at www.midvision.com.

• 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.

• Rearchitecting Change is a constant and businesses need to continually evolve their IT infrastructure and operations, build new environments for things like Disaster Recovery and automating the build and deployment of these new environments means delivering them faster.

WebSphere Application Server plugin overviewThe RapidDeploy™ plugin for WebSphere Application Server enables the automated deployment and configuration management of application servers. You may additionally, all without the use of scripts:

• Deploy and update the Enterprise applications or Web archives, and their associated application and scoped configurations such as JMS, JDBC, JVM resources and configurations etc.

• Template standard, reusable configurations including JMS and Database resources

• Snapshot your environments using JMX• Compare these in order to detect configuration drift• Create templates from your snapshots• Promote these templates to create further downstream

environments

WebSphere Application Server plugin templatesA ‘Create New’ template is available for environment creation from the edit/promote panel using the New Environment Definition function. This is a simple way to get started with the configuration files for some common use cases.

The available templates are:

• WebSphere Application Template - All settings required to deploy the enterprise application.

• WebSphere Cluster Template - You can configure Cluster settings, Web container, Session Replication, Port Allocation, JVM log file, JVM process definitions, Classpaths, JVM Transaction settings, Security settings, trace service, ORB service etc.

• WebSphere Data Source Template - All settings required to deploy one or more Database Libraries and Data Sources.

WebSphere Application Server plugin versionsThe RapidDeploy™ WebSphere Application Server Plugin supports WebSphere Application Server 5.x, 6.x 7.x and 8.x.

If you use a version of WebSphere Application Server that is not listed here and you would like to manage it using RapidDeploy™ please email sales@midvision.com with the details. For future versions, we aim to have support within two quarters of IBM announcing general availability, although customer demand can accelerate our development roadmap.

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WebSphere Application Server plugin task list• RunIIPTask• ManageProfileTask• NifEnhancerTask• SecureSoapPropsTask• ModifyHeapTask• DmgrChangeOwnerTask• NodeChangeOwnerTask• FederateNodeTask• StopWASserversTask• StartWASserversTask• IsServerInstalledTask• ConditionalBackupTask• RestoreTask• RemoveNodeTask• UninstallWASTask• WebSphere6ClusterStateChangeTask• WebSphere6DeploymentTask - Deployments to

WebSphere 6+ via the Jython framework• WebSphere6DeploymentTaskJms - Deployments

to WebSphere 6+ via the Jython framework but including JMS QCF, TCF Queue and Topic definitions.

• WebSphereConfigPropertiesExportTask• WebSphereConfigPropertiesImportTask• DeployConfigurationViaJmxTask• DeployFileViaJmxTask• EarExpanderWebSphereTask• IbmWebsphereBaseInstallTask• IbmWebsphereManageProfileTask

Rapiddeploy™ pluginsThe RapidDeploy™ plugins extend the functionality of the core automation framework and are categorised in the following way:

• Toolchain plugins enabling integration with Build Engines, Artifact repositories and Source Control Management tools

• Transport plugins enabling use of SSH and Agent capability

• Target plugins enabling connectivity with broad range of Middleware Applications and Databases

• Cloud plugins enabling connectivity to cloud providers

• Business Intelligence plugins to extend the CAF including for example, enhanced comparison functionality and additional reporting capabilities

plugins ship with:• A Library of commonly used tasks

• Wizards & extensive help information

• Predefined automation library elements

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Want this plugin? getting hold of it’s easy - either:1) Go to the Plugin Manager in your installation of RapidDeploy™ and pick your plugin from the list or

2) Go to www.midvision.com > Support > Downloads > RapidDeploy Plugin Downloads and select your plugin from there. If you have any problems, please call or email your MidVision Account Manager.

You must license your plugin separately - please speak to your MidVision Account Manager or email sales@midvision.com. If you are an IBM Rational Automation Framework customer and would like access to this plugin, please contact us at www.midvision.com.